At this difficult time, when so many Americans are struggling to put food on the table, wonât you please think of the Obamas?
This, after all, is a family thatâs given so much to America. And look what theyâve gotten in return! Sure, they have the two houses, one in a tony Washington, D.C., neighborhood and the other on even tonier Marthaâs Vineyard.
But those lucrative Netflix and book deals arenât going to last forever â and Barack is forbidden by the Constitution from getting his old job back.
And the former president isnât getting younger. With his 60th birthday coming Aug. 4, former top Obama White House adviser Valerie Jarrett took to Twitter to plead for his supporters to kick in a little gift of their own â a donation to pay for the planned Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.
âMy dear friend @BarackObama is turning 60 tomorrow,â she tweeted Tuesday. âFor his birthday gift, Iâm asking you to chip in $6 or $60 to help us bring the Obama Presidential Center to life in Chicago.â
This came, as Fox News reported, as the former president was preparing âa birthday party critics say would make Jay Gatsby blush â 475 guests, 200 staffers all squeezed together on his $11.75 million estate sprawling over 29 idyllic acres of Marthaâs Vineyard.â
The party was planned for Friday.
But on Wednesday, Obamaâs actual birthday, the former presidentâs spokeswoman announced that the massive event â criticized as a potential âsuperspreaderâ in the Coronavirus pandemic â was going to be downsized âsignificantly,â ABC News reported.
âDue to the new spread of the delta variant over the past week, the President and Mrs. Obama have decided to significantly scale back the event to include only family and close friends,â spokeswoman Hannah Hankins told the media, according to ABC.
By then, however, Jarrettâs tweet had already met with plenty of derision:
But hey, that center isnât going to pay for itself.
As Fox News noted, the Obama center is a $500 million project scheduled to be built in Jackson Park on Chicagoâs South Side, but itâs currently caught up in a federal review.
Sure, Obamaâs already gotten over $1 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Boeing and Microsoft, as Fox reported.
But Jarrettâs tweet sounded desperate. So maybe you could do your part and give Obama â$6 or $60.â Help a former president out.
How badly could Americans be hurting, after all? Aside from the fact that over four in 10 Americans have taken pay cuts or faced layoffs since the pandemic started, according to CBS News.
The numbers come from a report from the Pew Research Center released Friday that showed that roughly âhalf of all adults who are not retired say the pandemic has made it harder for them to reach their financial goals. This rises to 58% for lower-income people.â
But then, it was lower-income Americans who faced the biggest hit during the economic shutdowns â not only did they face a bigger drop in income, they also werenât able to cut expenses, since they were spending more of their income on necessities in the first place.
âUpper-income adults are also more likely than those with middle or lower incomes to say they have been spending less and saving more money since the Coronavirus outbreak began,â Pewâs report found.
Eight in 10 high-income Americans said they spent less, but only a third of low-income Americans did.
But just think: The Democrats, the party of the working person and the impoverished, theyâll have so much to be grateful for whenever that $500 million library opens.
And in the meantime, maybe Obama will invite one or two of them to his shindig once he reschedules it â as the help, of course, but at least theyâll be invited.
Until then, let them eat COVID lockdowns.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
