Santorum Hits Obama For “Interesting” Historical Interpretation Of U.S.

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At town hall events in Keene and Dublin, NH today, Rick Santorum unleashed his latest go-to line of attack against Barack Obama: that the president believes American exceptionalism is contingent with welfare programs. Speaking to a crowd at a school in Dublin, Santorum invoked the criticism for the second time in the span of a few hours:

“If you listen to Barack Obama, he has a very interesting view of the history of America. He talks about how broken America is. How fundamentally wrong America is on certain things. He gave a speech about 8-10 months ago, when he was reading off his teleprompter, and said that…America was not a great country until [the creation of welfare programs]. I would say to the president that all of these programs did not make us the greatest country in the history of the world, they made us like every other country.”

The speech Santorum seems to be referring to is one Obama delivered at George Washington University in Washington, DC on April 13, 2011. In that address, the president said that the United States is a “better” country because of programs such as Social Security, unemployment insurance and Medicaid. Obama then went one step further and said that the U.S. “would not be a great country without those commitments.” A straight reading of the speech would seem to indicate that Obama is saying welfare programs underscore America’s sense of unity and nationhood, rather than suggesting that those programs drove economic expansion.

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