Photo from WDIV live broadcast
President Barack Obama came to Flint on Wednesday -- many weeks after the presidential hopefuls had long moved on to other states -- and drank some filtered water, took a not so subtle swipe at the emergency manager system and the Republican party and offered words of hope.
"I want all of you to know I am confident that Flint with come back," he told a cheering crowd at Northwestern High's gymnasium.
The president met with residents at the high school's library. (Twitter photo via Valerie Jarrett)
He criticized the emergency manager system and the belief that less government is best. He did not mention the Republican Party, but clearly took a swipe. "The bad news is this should not have happened in the first place," Obama said.
He talked about the collapse of Flint's economy and how an emergency manager came "whose mandate was primarily to cut at all cost. And then some very poor decisions were made. All these things contributed to this crisis. All of you know the story."
"Now, I do not believe that anybody consciously wanted to hurt the people in Flint. And this is not the place to sort out every screw up that resulted in contaminated water. But I do think there's a larger issue that we have to acknowledge.
"Because I do think that part of what contributed to this was a broader mindset, a bigger attitude, a corrosive attitude that exists in our politics and exists in many levels of government. And it's a mindset that believes that less government is the highest good no matter what. It's a mindset that says environmental rules designed to keep your water clean or your air clean are optional or not that important or unnecessarily burden burden businesses or taxpayers. It's an ideology that undervalues the common good.
"We especially under invest when the communities we put at risk are poor or don't have a lot of political clout."
