During last night’s SOTU address President Obama framed much of the domestic policy part of the speech around the story of Rebekah and Ben Erler. He presented them as a young couple from Minneapolis who face many of the everyday struggles of ordinary Americans.

Seven years ago, Rebekah and Ben Erler of Minneapolis were newlyweds. She waited tables. He worked construction. Their first child, Jack, was on the way. They were young and in love in America, and it doesn’t get much better than that. “If only we had known,” Rebekah wrote to me last spring, “what was about to happen to the housing and construction market.” As the crisis worsened, Ben’s business dried up, so he took what jobs he could find, even if they kept him on the road for long stretches of time. Rebekah took out student loans and enrolled in community college and retrained for a new career. They sacrificed for each other, and slowly, it paid off. They bought their first home. They had a second son, Henry. Rebekah got a better job, and then a raise. Ben’s back in construction and home for dinner every night. “It is amazing,” Rebekah wrote, “what you can bounce back from when you have to. We are a strong, tight-knit family who has made it through some very, hard times.” “We are a strong, tight-knit family who has made it through some very, hard times.” America, Rebekah and Ben’s story is our story. They represent the millions who’ve worked hard and scrimped and sacrificed and retooled.

However, this glowing profile (and the one on the White House website) left out a big part of Rebekah Erler’s history. Specifically, the part where she was a Democrat campaign worker for Washington state Senator Patty Murray.



Rebekah Erler has been presented by the White House as a woman who was discovered by the president after she wrote to him last March about her economic hardships. She was showcased in the speech as proof that middle class Americans are coming forward to say that Obama’s policies are working. Unmentioned in the White House bio of Erler is that she is a former Democratic campaign operative, working as a field organizer for Sen. Patty Murray (D., Wash.). This also wasn’t the first time the White House used the former Democratic campaign staffer as a political prop. Obama spent a “day in the life” of Erler in June so that he could have “an opportunity to communicate directly with the people he’s working for every day.”

Back in June, when Obama met her in Minneapolis, Reuters pointed out that she had her campaign work listed on her LinkedIn profile, but buried that fact several paragraphs down in their story.

Now, I really don’t expect anyone sitting in the First Lady’s box to not have strong Democrat credentials. But Rebekah Erler is not just some average voter that Obama just “happened” to get an email from one day complaining about how hard life is as a working mom, that he just “happened” to read, which resulted in a lunch date in Minneapolis and becoming the poster child for all of his new “freebie” programs – free community college, new tax credits for working mothers, universal child care, and paid sick leave. The domestic part of the SOTU was pretty much a “Je Suis Rebekah!” rally from the president. Which, for those of us who “worked hard and scrimped and sacrificed and retooled” without asking the government for more freebies, or expecting that anyone beyond our immediate family and friends would help, is insulting.

So let’s not pretend that Rebekah Erler and her family are “average.” They have some pretty high-profile connections and a strong background in Democrat campaign work. But surely, you didn’t expect that President Obama would spend a “day in the life” of a Republican, did you?