Obama Visits Columbus - Workers Lose Pay

Obama Visits Columbus – Workers Lose Pay

Commentary by Sanford D. Horn

June 20, 2010

Barack Obama left his ivory tower to talk about the progress of the stimulus package, yet his visit cost construction workers a day’s pay and nary a word was uttered about it in the so-called main stream media. However, a BP spokesman, for whom English is not his first language, misplaced an idiom referring to the residents of the Gulf of Mexico as the “small people,” and all hell broke loose.

Obama just doesn’t get – he really doesn’t. While in the Columbus, Ohio area to give another one of his “rah rah,” innocuous speeches about how the alleged stimulus is working at the groundbreaking of a government-sponsored road project, a block or two away on Parsons Avenue in Livingston stood a hospital under construction void of its workers at the Turner-Smoot site.

Not only was the construction site shut down due to Obama’s security, but the employees were forced to take an UNPAID day off. Were I one of the workers at this construction site the only stimulus I would feel is the ire at this clueless administration. Could this be more wrong? These workers did not have a choice in this unpaid day off. Obama should pay the employees’ wages out of his own pocket – not the company till, and certainly not the taxpayers coffers – but Obama himself. Shame on him.

Obama was in town roughly 90 minutes, gave a 14 minute speech and then hustled out of dodge for whatever the rest of his agenda called for prior to showing up at Nationals Park to watch his beloved Chicago White Sox take on the home team in Friday night’s baseball game. And where was the union representing the income-deprived construction workers? Instead of fighting for the lost wages of those they are paid handsomely to represent, they are no doubt tucked snuggly in Obama’s back pocket.

As indicated above, the lame stream media did not report the whole story. The Washington Post, for example, had a picture of Obama with road workers standing supportively behind him – road workers benefiting from Obama’s largesse with the taxpayer’s money. No where in the lengthy, disingenuous story was it reported that the Obama visit supplanted the work of an entire construction site costing the workers a day’s pay. That information had to be culled from several on-line sources.

This is just another example of the cover up of an inept administration by a media unwilling to do their due diligence and report the whole story for the people who expect just that of a newspaper they pay good money to receive. Make the photo just a bit smaller and add a paragraph that completes the story giving the readers all the necessary information to make a fair assessment of a situation.

It’s called reporting, not fawning.

Sanford D. Horn is a writer and political consultant living in Alexandria, VA.