Too bad you didn’t screen caption that - the bots have scrubbed it!
Link: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view/2009081311-year-old_lobbed_prez_a_question_at_nh_foru
Error
You have encountered an unexpected error, the following exception occured:
No Article ID Specified
Please visit our home page for the latest news and information. Or, search our site for previously published stories.
If you have any questions, please submit your feedback
The mother of a sixth-grade Malden girl, whose “mean sign” question to President Obama at his Portsmouth, N.H., health care forum was a softball that he slugged out of the park, insisted yesterday the child was not “a plant.”
“I thought it was great,” Kathleen Manning Hall said of Obama’s answer to the question posed by her daughter Julia.
The girl became a target of conservative critics such as Michelle Malkin yesterday, who alleged that the poised and eloquent 11-year-old was “a plant” after the revelation that her mother served as an organizer for Obama’s campaign.
Hall’s work took her as far as Iowa, and she even met first lady Michelle Obama and first daughters Sasha and Malia. In all, she personally donated $1,280 to Obama’s run.
But she had no idea her daughter would be called on by the president, Hall said, declining to comment further because “there’s a child involved.”
Asked the young Julia in Portsmouth on Tuesday: “As I was walking in, I saw a lot of signs outside saying mean things about reforming health care. How do kids know what is true, and why do people want a new system that can . . . help more of us?
The child’s question was the second of the afternoon, after New Hampshire state Rep. Peter Schmidt’s lob, which he began by first praising his government Medicare plan and then saying, “Is it time to just say we’re going to pass what the American people need and what they want, without the Republicans?”
Justin Higgins, 20, of Stratham, N.H., an incoming freshman at Tufts University, posed a tougher question to Obama.
A registered independent, he asked how the president could institute health care reform without raising taxes on the middle class.
But he doesn’t think he got an answer.
“He was extremely vague,” Higgins said. “I was looking for something like . . . ‘No new taxes, as President George Bush the first did.”
Added Higgins: “There were a lot of softball questions.
Asked yesterday about how questioners are picked, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said, “the president asks people to raise their hands and picks on them.”
Gibbs added that audience members were selected “randomly by computer.”
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1190680