Let me preface this by saying that I do believe Obama lies out both sides of his mouth, his ears and his nose at the same time…I could go on, but it would be unseemly to bring other orifices into it.
That said, I understood the “small donations” part to refer not just to the pedestal, and not at all to the purchase of the statue which was, as the author correctly points out, a gift from France.
But, it was a gift from France that sat for years unassembled to the point that other US cities were making bids to have it erected there instead. Pulitzer used the NY World to drum up support for funding to assemble the statue which, at the rate it was going, didn’t look like it was going to happen at all…the funding for that came in, as O said, in dribs and drabs from the American people. In that, he was accurate that they were paying for the construction of it even though they were not paying for the fabrication of the copper plates themselves, which were a gift.
Another little-known piece of history…the statue was originally designed to stand at the Port Said entrance to the (then) new Suez canal…only, they thought it was ugly and didn’t want it, so it was given to the US instead.
