Only the Little People Pay Insurance Premiums

You might remember back in 1992 President Bush pere took a beating after the New York Times revealed while attending a photo-op at a convention of the National Grocers Association, the President had shown astonishment at a supermarket scanner being demonstrated for him; he allegedly gave all appearances of never having seen one before. The Times, and many other liberal organs, published the usual anguished hand-wringers (bashed out by the hardened proletariat comprising their editorial offices) bemoaning how "out of touch" President Bush was with the ordinary citizen.

It quickly turned out the Times story was utter bullshit, yet another one of those "fake but accurate" accounts the Times so loves to run so long as they reflect badly on Republicans; but the damage was done and the false story contributed mightily to the President's declining poll numbers, leading to his defeat by Bill Clinton that November.

Now comes our latter day President, making an analogy while thumping for his plan for national health insurance, with an anecdote from his past when he was just a struggling ordinary citizen himself:

When I was young, just got out of college, I had to buy auto insurance. I had a beat-up old car. And I won’t name the name of the insurance company, but there was a company — let’s call it Acme Insurance in Illinois. And I was paying my premiums every month. After about six months I got rear-ended and I called up Acme and said, I’d like to see if I can get my car repaired, and they laughed at me over the phone because really this was set up not to actually provide insurance; what it was set up was to meet the legal requirements. But it really wasn’t serious insurance.
Now, it’s one thing if you’ve got an old beat-up car that you can’t get fixed. It’s another thing if your kid is sick, or you’ve got breast cancer

That the President, a former law professor, seems ignorant the difference between first and third-party insurance suggests a rather severe degree of his being "out of touch" with the ordinary citizen, along with his famously arrogant aloofness, but unlike the first President Bush, who was wholly innocent of the calumny of the New York Times, President Obama will, of course, get another pass from the media for this latest cynical blunder.