Margaret Talev of the McClatchy Newspapers wrote an interesting article about Nash McCabe who ABC News used as a stand-in to ask Barack Obama about flag pins so Charlie and George didn’t have to further embarrass themselves by doing so.
McCabe doesn’t like Obama because he’s a Golden Boy. Everything seems to come easily to him. According to McCabe, Clinton has to grind it out for her successes. McCabe identifies with that:
McCabe met her husband, Lloyd, in April 1983 at a dance. They married two months later. Six months after that, she says, he was injured in a coal mine accident. He hasn’t worked since.
They never had children. He had back surgery. The muscle relaxers he took damaged his heart. He’s had three bypasses, nine angioplasties, seven stents and a pacemaker. Three months ago doctors found a brain tumor. His choice: surgery that he may or may not survive, or life in a wheelchair.
Over 25 years of marriage, McCabe was the breadwinner. She said it took eight years to get her husband disability payments, during which time they racked up huge bills.
“I was a nurse’s aide, a cashier,” McCabe said. “From 1996 to 2000, I was a manager of a cleaning company. I started out as secretary and worked my way up to manager, and then the company decided to close. It took me almost two-and-a-half years to find a job that I got laid off from recently” as a clerk-typist. She has a high school diploma.
Sometimes the McCabes borrow money from her parents, who are in their 70s. She has a request in to the local food bank to see if she and her husband qualify.
“People who have sick spouses or children understand how hard it is,” she said.
Her situation certainly isn’t unique. I probably hear 4 or 5 similar stories every week in the course of my debt collection practice. Most of those folks aren’t deadbeats or people trying to shirk their debts. But plenty of them seem to lack good planning skills or a long view of the consequences of their actions. A lot of them –perhaps out of necessity– live in the now without dwelling a great deal on the future; not taking advantage of the fact that “a stitch in time saves nine” or an “ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” etc. Where you are willing and able to take advantage of that sort of planning, things do start looking easy. (And, for what it’s worth, I’m not saying that’s the whole reason for any of their problems — some things simply can’t be planned for. And, sometimes, you simply have to eat your seed corn to avoid starving.)
But I can’t figure how any of this translates to flag pins or flags, generally. Her question for Obama was to note that he generally doesn’t wear a flag lapel pin and to ask “I want to know if you believe in the American flag.” Buh?
Obama received a lot of grief for his “bitter” comments. How dare he suggest that people’s frustration with their economic situation translates into them making political decisions based on non-economic issues like guns and God? But now we have a woman who has been beaten around pretty good by the economy who is apparently basing her political decisions on things like flag pins and jealousy over a politician’s seemingly innate gifts.
Where the rational thing to do would to be to probe which politician’s plans would help improve her situation; she’s asking about flags.
It sounds as though Mcabe has accepted her situation. My guess is she knows NO candidate from either side will improve her lot in life to any substantial degree, and she bases her likes and dislikes on more simple criteria, like her sense of a lack of patriotism maybe from Obama….
THE FLAG EXISTS! I’VE SEEN IT WITH MY VERY OWN EYES!! BIGFOOT WAS CARRYING ONE!!!
(following the trend of using all caps and exclamation points to add legitimacy)
I wasn’t going to take your word for it, Brenda, but the third ! sold me…
I am the only truly patriotic candidate in the race. American Flag Lapel Pin is patriotism you can count on!
I physically represent this important issue. I’m looking forward not only to the support of Ms. McCabe, but to an interview with Charlie Gibson.
http://www.lapelpin08.com/
Tim–
She knows of no candidate because she’s uninformed. Deeper in the article she thinks his upbringing was more privileged than Hillary’s. She’s just uninformed, and appears to be willfully so.
She has all of these problems, and is given the chance to talk directly to possibly the future president. Who among us has ever been afforded the opportunity. And this is what she chose to ask.
It is ironic that this person who aimed to knock down Obama instead served as the perfect example of a bitter person clinging to something rather than voting on issues that directly affect her life.
She also wasn’t wearing a flag pin when she asked the question. The other two candidates aren’t wearing them either.
She’s also quoted as saying every time she sees him, she looks for a lapel pin. I wonder if such an obsession translates into other areas of her life that might be affecting her employability.
T..That’s a hell of an analysis. Then again, maybe she just doesn’t like him.
And you mention “She knows of no candidate because she’s uninformed.” Well, maybe by your standards. Does everyone have to be as “informed” as you or as you’d like?
Just out of curiosity, was the subject matter of this debate really any more ridiculous than CNN and the melting snowman You-tube debate? Remember the questions from (as T would imply) the uninformed masses??
You guys have short memories, Gibson & Steph have absolutely NO monopoly on dumb-ass questions.
If she “just doesn’t like him” then she shouldn’t superimpose her dumbass flag agenda onto the debate. She should just fucking say, “I don’t like him. Period.” She should drop all the pretense that the wearing of the flag–that none of the candidates is doing–is important.
She should at least be informed enough to know that a single-parent upbringing in third-world countries would be considered by most reasonable people to be less cushy than Hillary’s, before she goes stating the exact opposite in newspapers. Or if by “easy” she’s alluding to the fact that he was able to get a nice education, then she should just say that she doesn’t believe some poeple should have such things, or that she’s suspicious of such things or whatever. This woman doesn’t even appear to have a basic understanding of the biographies of either of these candidates, and yet she wants to be some kind of arbiter determining whether one (and only one) of them is sufficiently worshipful of the flag. She’s a joke.
The You-Tube debate had its shortcomings, but at least all of it was within a format that was already understood to have such shortcomings. I mean, an entire debate of submitted vids was sure to be sketchy. Remember the freak who shook the bible and intoned in an ominous voice that he wanted to know if the candidate believed every single word in the book was literally true? That was video gold. In the case of this debate, though, it was a standard moderated debate, except for this bizarre woman who planted herself in the debate to claim she wasn’t questioning his patriotism and then do just that. She’s probably too stupid to know how much her appearance has helped him.
My wife told me a funny story about why she hates Obama.
My wife is a pretty high achiever. She’s a pretty typical high achieving female, in fact. She had a 4.0 average in both undergrad and grad school, for example (in Civil Engineering).
So in high school, she ran for student council president. She had been on the student council, and thought that she was the most qualified candidate.
Her opponent? A stoner nicknamed “Boner”. He had never been involved in anything, but the cool kids decided that “Boner” should run. He ran, and he won.
Hillary is my wife. Hillary is the most qualified person for the job, she’s done the most work to get it, has the highest GPA, etc.
Obama is Boner.