Looks like Barack Obama has finally made peace with — well, not his Maker, but something very close to the devil: Walmart.
For years, Obama and his fellow Democrats have demonized Walmart as anti-worker.
So it was a surprise when the president this week named Sylvia Mathews Burwell, who runs the Walmart Foundation (the company’s charitable arm), as his new budget director.
As Buzzfeed reports, back in 2008, when then-Sen. Obama was vying for his party’s presidential nomination, he used the Arkansas-based retail giant as a political club. In particular, he used Walmart to bash his chief opponent, Hillary Clinton.
“While I was working on those streets, watching those folks see their jobs shift overseas,” Obama said at one debate, “you were a corporate lawyer sitting on the board of Walmart.”
Later his campaign would say of the Clinton team: “If they want to defend her service to one of the least environmentally friendly, least labor-union-friendly companies in the country, they’re welcome to do that.”
Obama promised not to shop there and his wife Michelle resigned from the board of TreeHouse Foods, a Walmart supplier.
Now the president is shopping for White House personnel at Walmart, while the first lady, visiting a store in Missouri, gushed how “in the last two years, Walmart saved customers $2.3 billion on fresh fruits and vegetables across the nation.”
With the Democratic exorcism now apparently complete, does this mean New York City shoppers might finally get a Walmart of their own?