This could be worse than mixing metaphors. If Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama is going to ad lib in a speech about the economy by invoking black 1970s breakthrough TV, he could at least get it right.
In his Oct. 29 speech in
“If Sen. McCain is elected, we’ll have another president who wants to privatize part of your Social Security,” Obama said. “That ain’t right. Can you imagine if you had your Social Security invested in the stock market these last two weeks? These last two months? You wouldn’t need Social Security. You’d be having a – you know like, what was it. ‘Sanford and Son,’ ‘I’m coming Weezie.’ It ain’t right.”
But, Obama blew it in his attempt to be ‘70s hip. “Weezie” or Louise Jefferson, was a character on “The Jeffersons,” a show about a middle-class black family. Actress Isabel Sanford portrayed her.
On “Sanford and Son,” Redd Foxx played Fred Sanford, a get-rich-quick-schemer who would pretend to have heart attacks in times of distress and say: “Oh, this is the big one! You hear that,
Obama’s speech, full of class-warfare rhetoric, made a folksy push midway through, as he began substituting “that’s not right,” for “that ain’t right.”
“If Sen. McCain is elected, 100 million Americans will not get a tax cut,” Obama said. “But the average Fortune 500 CEO will get $700,000 in tax relief. Average 500 Fortune 500 CEO will get an average of $700,000. Big oil will get $4 billion. Somebody said, that ain’t right. Not only is it not right, it ain’t right. If Sen. McCain – if Sen. McCain is elected, your health care benefits will get taxed for the first time in history. And at least 20 million Americans risk losing their employer-based health insurance. That ain’t right.”
This all could be an attempt by Obama to play to an important constituency.