What a sweet story. A local struggling mom writes a letter to the President and she gets not only a lunch meeting with him but later gets featured in his State Of The Union speech. A very touching story about a regular woman...who "coincidentally" was a Democrat operative. However, the Minneapolis Star Tribune very "mysteriously" left this very important fact out of the story about her written by Allison Sherry.
This prominent background fact was not exactly hidden from view. Ms Sherry could have googled the woman in question, Rebekah Erler, and found a Reuters article from last June that pointed out her connection to Democrat Senator Patty Murray as a field organizer as well as a Minnesota Republican press release of that month revealing the same information. However, not to spoil the Sherry's carefully crafted story that oh so conveniently neglected to mention you know what, cue up the violins as we read about the travails of a "regular" struggling woman:
A 36-year-old Minneapolis mother of two was prominently featured by President Obama in his State of the Union address. He called her family’s story “the reason I ran for this office” before pitching a score of tax reform and domestic policy proposals Tuesday.
Rebekah Erler was discovered last year when she wrote an eloquent letter to the president describing her middle-class struggles: She and her husband, Ben, moved to Minnesota after Ben’s business was crushed by the housing crash in Seattle. Rebekah took out student loans to go to local community college so she could become an accountant. They were doing OK in Minneapolis, they both had jobs, they had recently purchased a new house in St. Anthony, they had two healthy kids.
But, Rebekah wrote, costs of child care, groceries and day-to-day living was getting the better of the family. She decided to write the president. “I think after a long day, that night she sat down and just wanted to say something,” her husband told the Star Tribune at the time.
The letter resonated with Obama. He flew to Minneapolis last June and took Rebekah Erler to lunch at Matt’s bar in south Minneapolis during a two-day stay in the Twin Cities that included a couple of other speeches.
On Tuesday, in front of a joint session of Congress, he recounted the Erlers’ story. Rebekah was sitting in the first lady’s box. She had some time in the Oval Office Tuesday with a few other letter writers, and hung out with the president.
“We are a strong, tight-knit family who has made it through some very, very hard times,” Obama said. “America, Rebekah and Ben’s story is our story. They represent the millions who have worked hard and scrimped and sacrificed and retooled … You’re the people I was thinking of six years ago today, in the darkest months of the [economic] crisis.”
As Rush Limbaugh pointed out on his radio show today, out of all the people in America, why use a Democrat campaign operative and try to pass her off as a regular person? Take it away, Rushbo:
This woman, whose story of economic recovery was showcased by Obama on last night's State of the Union show, is a former Democratic campaign staffer and has been used by Obama for political events in the past. It was a total fraudulent presentation.
Unmentioned in the White House bio of Erler is that she is a former Democratic campaign operative, working as a field organizer for Sen. Patty Murray (D., Wash.). This also wasn’t the first time the White House used the former Democratic campaign staffer as a political prop. Obama spent a 'day in the life' of Erler in June so that he could have 'an opportunity to communicate directly with the people he’s working for every day.
...She was a plant. She's a former Democrat campaign staffer for Senator Patty Murray. She has been used as a plant prior to this night by Obama for the exact same purpose. She's not a real success story. She is bought and paid for by the Democrat Party. And she had a job last night. She was assigned to portray an average American citizen seated next to Michelle (My Belle) Obama during the State of the Union show. Why do I want to watch this garbage, folks?
You know, why use a fake? Why not go out and find a real person? If your economic policies are so wonderful, and if everything you've done for the middle class is so great -- and if this economy roaring back is so legitimate, if it's so genuine -- it should have been easy to find someone who legitimately came back from genuine hardship. It should have been all over the place out there, right? America should be filled with these stories.
To their credit, many readers of that whitewashed Star Tribune story noticed the glaring absence of the most important piece of information about Rebekah Erler:
This woman is a former Democratic staffer and she was far from a "random" selection as she has been portrayed in the media.
The thing about this is that she is a former staff of U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) and worked on President Obama's 2008 campaign. So, not just a "Minnesota mother of two" but also a former Democratic operative. I just find it totally amazing that Allison and her media colleagues think that information is not worth reporting.
LOL, no doubt the swooning media knew the back story too.
We leave you now with Obama's tribute to the teary eyed Democrat campaign operative being passed off as a regular mom.
UPDATE: The reason why the Star Tribune reporter Allison Sherry failed to reveal that Rebekah Erler was a Democrat operative is that Sherry herself has a long history of acting as an unofficial Democrat operative. ColoradoPeakPolitics has a huge catalog of Sherry's liberal biases while working on behalf of the Democrats at the Denver Post.
