Obama: 'American people aren't stupid'
Posted: Monday, September 08, 2008 4:41 PM by Domenico Montanaro
From NBC/NJ’s Carrie Dann
FLINT, Mich. -- Fighting back against McCain and Palin’s effort to paint themselves as mavericks rolling up their sleeves for a Washington housecleaning, Obama today charged Palin with flip-flopping on her opposition to Alaska’s infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” project.
“Let’s get the facts clear here,” Obama said, noting the McCain campaign’s new ad that showcases Palin’s opposition to the pilloried pork project. “When she was mayor, she hired a Washington lobbyist to get earmarks -- pork barrel spending.”
“When it came to the Bridge to Nowhere,” Obama continued, alluding to the refrain of flip-flopping so effectively used against John Kerry in 2004, “she was for it until everybody started raising a fuss about it and she started running for governor and then suddenly she was against it!”
And in some of his strongest language yet, Obama suggested that, in its new ad, the McCain-Palin ticket was simply trying to “make stuff up.”
“You can’t just recreate yourself,” said the Democratic nominee. “You can’t just reinvent yourself. The American people aren’t stupid.”
Facing a GOP ticket newly invigorated by McCain’s surprise pick of outsider Palin, Obama accused the McCain-Palin ticket today of trying to “repackage” itself and falsely co-opt his own message of change. The Democratic nominee wondered aloud how George Bush’s would-be successor can champion change “with a straight face” and referred to the GOP ticket as the “No Change Express.”
Obama blamed the economic troubles by Americans like those in troubled Flint, Michigan -- where unemployment is nearly twice the national average -- on failed economic policies that were sponsored by the Bush administration and would be, Obama says, continued by McCain.
“You can’t be for change when it’s your party that for the last eight years has ignored the fact that wages and incomes for the middle class have gone flat since George Bush took office,” he told a cheering crowd of over 300 at Mott Community College in Flint.
In an e-mail response, the McCain campaign hit back, citing Obama's most-liberal-Senator ranking by the National Journal as evidence of his partisan inability to negotiate real change. "If he thinks that voters are going to believe his rhetoric on the campaign trail in the absence of any bipartisan record," wrote McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds, "he's clearly underestimating the intelligence of the American people."
