Obama: Did he call Americans ‘lazy’?

last updated 8 January 2015

Does President Obama think Americans are lazy? asked Jonathan Allen and Alex Isenstadt in Politico.com. A stray comment made during his trip to Asia last week—“we’ve been a little bit lazy”—has been “spreading across the campaign landscape on winged feet.” The quote plays into conservatives’ belief that the president loves “trash-talking” America; Texas Gov. Rick Perry even made it the centerpiece of a TV ad, incredulously asking viewers, “Can you believe that?” No, I can’t, said David Weigel in Slateâ€‹.com. If you look at a tape of Obama’s speech, it’s clear that the quote was taken “completely out of context.” Obama was talking about government’s role in attracting foreign investment to the U.S., when he said, “We’ve been a little bit lazy, I think, over the last couple of decades....We aren’t out there hungry, selling America and trying to attract new business into America.” The lazy people, in other words, are business leaders and bureaucrats, “not average Americans.”

“You can understand the confusion,” said Jonah Goldberg in NationalReview.com. Obama has a long history of condescending criticism of Americans, especially those who disagree with him. Remember when he called Pennsylvania voters “bitter” xenophobes who “cling to guns or religion”? Just a few weeks ago, he said Americans had gotten “a little soft,” and told donors at a fund-raiser that “we have lost our ambition.” The irony here, said Richard M. Salsman in Forbes.com, is that the biggest disincentive to foreign investment is Obama himself. His focus on higher taxes and burdensome regulations has “sapped entrepreneurial vitality and chilled investor risk-taking.” Blaming others for his policy failures is a “bullying, despicable insult.”

But the truth is that we have become lazy, said Roland S. Martin in CNN.com. We’ve taken America’s supremacy for granted for too long, and now we’re struggling to keep up with countries that are outhustling and outthinking us. “This nation needs a swift kick in the butt, and there is nothing wrong when President Obama says it.” If he wants to be re-elected, said Carter Eskew in WashingtonPost.com, he’d better stop saying it so often. The president has created a reputation for playing “critic in chief”; even if he’s right, his criticism is starting to stick in Americans’ craws. After the three years we’ve had, we need a president willing to play cheerleader—not the “disgruntled fan in the stands booing the home team.”