Matt Damon, yes that Matt Damon, used to be one of the biggest advocates for President Barack Obama. Well, now those tables have turned, as Damon recently slammed the president in an issue of Elle Magazine, according to the Huffington Post.
“I’ve talked to a lot of people who worked for Obama at the grassroots level. One of them said to me, ‘Never again. I will never be fooled again by a politician,'” Damon told the magazine. “You know, a one-term president with some balls who actually got stuff done would have been, in the long run of the country, much better.”
Damon then continued to discuss the Occupy Wall Street movement across the country:
“If the Democrats think that they didn’t have a mandate — people are literally without any focus or leadership, just wandering out into the streets to yell right now because they are so pissed off … Imagine if they had a leader.”
The statement about Occupy Wall Street by Damon is close to what Obama said to Diane Sawyer back in March of 2010:
“I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president… There’s a tendency in Washington to think that our job description, of elected officials, is to get reelected. That’s not our job description. Our job description is to solve problems and to help people.”
This recent criticism of the president follows in the same footsteps of other complaints Damon has made about Obama and the Democrats back in March.
“I really think he misinterpreted his mandate. A friend of mine said to me the other day, I thought it was a great line, ‘I no longer hope for audacity,'” Damon Piers Morgan on CNN. “He’s doubled down on a lot of things, going back to education… the idea that we’re testing kids and we’re tying teachers’ salaries to how kids are performing on tests, that kind of mechanized thinking has nothing to do with higher order. We’re training them, not teaching them.”
Then, later in the month of March, Obama was attacked again by Damon, this time regarding the economic crisis.
“I think he’s rolled over to Wall Street completely. The economy has huge problems. We still have all these banks that are too big to fail. They’re bigger and making more money than ever. Unemployment at 10 percent? It’s terrible,” he said to The Independent. “They had a chance that they don’t have any more to stand up for things. They’ve probably squandered that at this point. They’ll probably just make whatever deals they can to try to get elected again.”
Back in August, Damon verbally attacked a cameraman and reporter from a conservative publication who decided to challenge Damon’s stance on education while in attendance of a Save Our Schools event in D.C. After Damon attacked those two, he attacked economic policies.
“The wealthy are paying less than they paid at any time else, certainly in my lifetime, and probably in the last century,” Damon said to a reporter at the event. “I don’t know what we were paying in the roaring 20’s; it’s criminal that so little is asked of people who are getting so much. I don’t mind paying more. I really don’t mind paying more taxes. I’d rather pay for taxes than cut ‘Reading is Fundamental’ or Head Start or some of these programs that are really helping kids. This is the greatest country in the world; is it really that much worse if you pay 6% more in taxes? Give me a break. Look at what you get for it: you get to be American.”