United States President Barack Obama always said that change would not come easily. Neither, apparently, does explaining it.
Called on to offer reassurances that his healthcare plan would not lead to increased taxes or hurt the economy, Obama spent 17 minutes and 14 seconds on his response.
“This is an area where there’s been just a whole lot of misinformation,” he told workers at a battery factory in North Carolina.
“And I’m going to have to work hard over the next several months to clean up a lot of the misapprehensions that people have.”
Then the president, seemingly undeterred by the glassy eyes, the yawns from the front row and the occasional dash for the exit by members of the audience at the factory, wandered freely from the deficit to discuss Warren Buffet, international aid, Medicare and payroll taxes. He made lists of his points, and then sub-lists.
If that were not confusing enough, he threw in a few acronyms for government programmes.
In all, Obama’s response to a woman’s concerns that Americans were over-taxed stretched to 2 500 words. That is barely a blink of an eye for a world-class orator such as Fidel Castro — but probably more than the workers had bargained for during a lunchtime question and answer session last Friday.
By the midway point, even Obama began to realise he may have offered a little too much detail.
He interrupted a point he was making about the Congressional budget office’s findings about potential savings to be had from rooting out fraud and waste in the healthcare system to apologise.
“I’m sorry, by the way, these questions sometimes are — or these answers are — long,” he said.
But even that point apparently bore repeating.
“Boy, that was a long answer,” Obama said when he finally closed. “I’m sorry, but I hope everybody — but I hope I answered her question.” – guardian.co.uk