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Obama In L.A.: Give Me More Time, Money

Kevin Douglas Grant |
April 21, 2011 | 9:03 a.m. PDT

Executive Editor

After telling supporters in San Francisco on Wednesday night that he knows it's been hard to stomach his compromises so far, President Obama warned there would still be more to come.

"There are times when I've felt the same way you do. It's a big, complicated, messy democracy," he told hundreds of young audience members. "We knew this wouldn't be easy."

On Thursday evening Obama is scheduled to hit three events in Los Angeles, tapping into the Hollywood support that buoyed him in 2008.  

Variety wrote: "As President Obama returns to Hollywood circles on Thursday for his first re-election fund-raising swing, it's not difficult to find supporters expressing frustration or disappointment privately and publicly.

What has not materialized, however, is a sense that showbizzers will be looking elsewhere."

Obama has a heaping plateful of crises on his desk, including the syrocketing national debt, unemployment, gas prices, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and depending on how things go, the 2012 Election.

The drumbeat of criticism for Obama's handling of his office so far is getting louder, most recently led by possible GOP presidential contender Donald Trump.

Jonathan Martin at Politico wrote:

In addition to the media codependence, there’s another force at work in Trump’s rise: the appetite among an element of the Republican base for a leader who will offer no-holds-barred criticism of Obama.

With no other Republican hopefuls gaining traction, Trump has become a blinking neon stand-in for a candidate who will go beyond mainstream boundaries and make the case for why Obama isn’t just a bad president presiding over a declining America but perhaps an illegitimate one.

Although this "illegitimacy" has focused on Obama's birthplace and his legal qualification to be president, other critics have latched on the the legitimacy of Obama's decisions while in office.  

Salon's Glenn Greenwald wrote a piece arguing that Obama's political compromises, which look like bad negotiating to some, are calculated moves that reveal Obama has no loyalty to the progressive movement:

"What evidence is there that Obama has some inner, intense desire for more progressive outcomes? These are the results they're getting because these are the results they want -- for reasons that make perfectly rational political sense."

If Greenwald is right, then Hollywood stars and starlets will be wise to ignore the progressive promises that may pour from Obama's mouth Thursday night.



 

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