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• Thursday, September 11, 2008 10:30 PM

  A portion of his youth in poverty?

  Okay, maybe I shouldn't have used that word. "Barack Obama spent a portion of his youth in poverty," how's that?

  Meaningless. He spent a far greater percentage of his childhood wealthier than normal and attended the most elite private school in Hawaii.

  Because yes, damn it, if your mother has to apply for food stamps to keep you fed, you are poor.

  No, plenty of people get public assistance of various levels that I would never count as poor. In fact, many are solidly middle class.

  Food stamps, more so during Obama's youth, are there to help keep people from being poor. It was a way to supplement food, especially back then. It in no way meant that you were poor, though it did mean you were having financial trouble.

  You may not be as poor as some other people -- poverty is always relative; most poor people in America are rich by comparison to what passes for the middle class in much of the world -- but you need food stamps, you are not middle class and you are damn sure not rich.

  Now, exactly when was Barak Obama living on Food stamps? Because it's very hard to place him at any time where they would have been legally available. He was to young to have collected them before moving to Indonesia, and was living with his grandparents when he came back in 1974.

  Now, it's possible that his grandparents used food stamps, but they were hardly poor and Obama was attending an expensive private school.

  I want to take him at his word here, but it's hard to find a time when HE was dependent on food stamps. His mother could have been, but that's not his claim.

  —Xanthro Read Xanthro's other letters
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