Michael Moore President Obama - P 2011
Getty ImagesOutspoken liberal Michael Moore says President Obama is not the man he thought he was campaigning for during the 2008 presidential election.
In an interview with the BBC, the filmmaker described the chief executive’s first term as “heartbreaking” and a “disappointment.”
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“He did not come into office like I had hoped that he would, to do what Franklin Roosevelt did in his first few months where he came in and said, you know, ‘I’m in charge, this is the way we’re doing things, if you don’t like it, throw me out of office,’ and then he set about doing what he had to do,” Moore said.
He argued that Obama, in fact, did quite the opposite.
‘Barack Obama came in and said, ‘What can I do to help you?’ and every time he attempted to help the Republicans, they just shut the door in his face,” Moore said. “He inherited a horrible situation but he spent three years, if we could just go back to the sports analogy, you know, running the ball in the wrong direction.”
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Moore said that only now, in the final year of his first term, is Obama starting to show signs of what he doing what Moore expected from him at the outset.
“Now we’re in the last quarter of his first term, and he’s actually come alive,” Moore said. “He’s actually now standing up, and he’s trying to stop a big corporate merger [AT&T and T-Mobile], and he’s putting forth jobs bills that make sense now.”
Moore added that he wishes this kind of action is “somewhat heartening” even though he would have liked to have seen it sooner.
This isn’t the first time Moore has criticized Obama. In August, he ranted on his Twitter feed that Standard & Poor’s was to blame for the 2008 economic collapse and that the president needed to take action.
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“Pres Obama, show some guts & arrest the CEO of Standard & Poors. These criminals brought down the economy in 2008& now they will do it again,” Moore wrote.
In March, he ripped into Obama for taking military action in Libya and suggested that Obama return his Nobel Peace Prize, tweeting: “May I suggest a 50-mile evacuation zone around Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize? #returnspolicy”
In 2009, he wrote an open letter to the president, criticizing his decision to send an additional 30,000 troops into Afghanistan.
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Moore’s most recent comments come on the heels of Obama’s visit to Los Angeles as part of an effort to further tap into Hollywood money. On Monday, he visited Roscoe’s House of Chicken ‘n Waffles and attended a $35,800-per-person dinner at the Hancock Park home of Hitch producer James Lassiter and his wife, Mai, followed by a Latino fundraising gala at the nearby home of Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas.
On Tuesday, he sat down for an interview on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno before heading to San Francisco.
