Obama Goes After Hillary Voters
(CBS)
From CBS News' Maria Gavrilovic:
CINCINNATI -- Barack Obama wooed Hillary Clinton’s key constituency today: women over the age of 50. He hosted a roundtable on retirement security, where five women spoke of their struggles.
One undecided voter, Colleen Hunninghoff, told Obama that she understands why young voters are jumping on the “Obama bandwagon,” but wants to know what the real differences are between him and Clinton.
“We’ve been doing well amongst more experienced voters as well,” Obama chuckled, going on to explain that he is more capable of unifying the people and ending the “political bickering” in Washington. “I’m a Democrat but there are people out there who are Republicans and we’ve got to be able to cross the aisle in order to get things done,” he said.
He also accused Hillary Clinton of taking money from special interests and not taking the issue of lobbyists seriously.
“I think I take it a lot more serious than Senator Clinton does,” Obama said. “She doesn’t mind taking money from those sources and I don’t see that as central to the changes that are needed.”
Obama said his critics suggest that his supporters are delusional and are being duped into believing in hope.
“The basic argument is that if you talk about hope, and if you are engaging the American people in thinking hopefully, that somehow you are duping them, that you are playing a trick on them. That all of you here are infatuated with these pretty words but you don’t have a real good sense of how the world works, you’re not hard headed, you’re not tough minded, that you’re romantics, that somehow being hopeful means that you are just passive and sitting back waiting for good things to just happen to you,” he said. “But hope is looking at things clear eyed, and saying despite the hardship, I’m going try to do something.”
