Obama becomes a blunt talking president
ANALYSIS - President Obama increasingly sounds like a man with the freedom to say exactly what he thinks...
President Obama increasingly sounds like a man with the freedom to say exactly what he thinks.
In an interview published Sunday with the New York Times, he dismissed a question about whether he exceeded his presidential authority by delaying the employer mandate in the Affordable Care Act, arguing some Republicans “think I usurp my authority by having the gall to win the presidency. And I don’t think that’s a secret.”
It was the kind of sharp, anti-GOP language more common for liberal pundits on MSNBC than the president himself.
In a closed-door session with black leaders on the renewal of the Voting Rights Act Monday, Obama was again quite blunt.
Referring to getting a new version of the VRA passed in Congress, he said, “this is small-bore stuff compared to lynching and shootings and killings that happened 50 years ago,” as first reported by Politico.
At a meeting on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Obama not only defended Larry Summers, his controversial former aide who the president is considering to run the Federal Reserve, but said the Huffington Post had turned Summers into a “liberal whipping boy.”
None of these sentiments are surprising coming from Obama. But it rare to hear the president directly criticize a single news outlet, invoke lynchings or pointedly acknowledge that some Republicans question his legitimacy as commander-in-chief. And along with his moving speech about the George Zimmerman trial last month, it suggests President Obama may start saying things in his second term he never would have considered in his first four years in office.
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