Being in the second and last term of his presidency, Obama's latest mini-scandal or faux pas is not so damaging but it is the type of thing which is alienating towards many humanities-minded constituents.

"I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree," Obama said Thursday in front of a crowd at a General Electric plant in Waukesha, Wis. at a conference centered on boosting job-training programs.

He continued by saying, "Now, there's nothing wrong with an art history degree; I love art history, so I don't want to get a bunch of emails from everybody. I'm just saying, you can make a really good living and have a great career without getting a four-year college education, as long as you get the skills and training that you need," he added.

Defenders of the humanities such as art history claim that cutting back on humanities disciplines discourages critical and decisive thinking and creative problem solving and that many of the nation's most important innovators in technology and business have degrees in the humanities. Proponents agree that humanities graduates can play a leading role in corporations, engineering, international relations, government, and other fields where their skills and creating thinking play a critical role.

Obama was a humanities major himself, having graduated with a political science degree from Columbia University. According to NPR, a writer who was an art-history major said of Obama: "What I noticed is that that office takes your personality and exaggerates it -- you become a caricature of who you are. And he has a personality trait that costs him politically, and it's the personality trait of a writer. He really is at bottom a writer, and the trait is -- he's in a moment and not in a moment at the same time. He can be in a room but detach himself at the same time. It's almost as if he's writing about it at the same time he's participating in it. It's a curious inside-outside thing, and the charge that he's aloof grows right out of this trait. So he's got these traits that are of ambiguous value to the job, but you can't do anything about it, it's who he is. His politics -- he's essentially a pragmatist. His nature is problem solving. He's not an ideologue, so it's a little hard to get too worked up either way about his politics."