President Obama compared Republicans to Grumpy Cat and shocked them
out of their Twilight Zone of denial by dropping an economic fact bomb
on the Republican cabal.
While speaking at the DNC Women’s Leadership Forum, President Obama mentioned a
New York Times
article written by John Harwood, which detailed that Republicans have a
data problem because the U.S. budget deficit grew during the juntas of Reagan and both shrubs, but was eliminated during
Clinton and sharply cut during Obama.
Right after calling Republicans Grumpy Cat, the President said,
“There was an article I think in The New York Times today, or maybe it
was yesterday, where they pointed out that it’s very hard for them
(Republicans) to make the arguments they make about tax cuts for the
wealthy and doing the same stuff that they’ve been promoting, and trying
to eliminate regulations on the big banks and all that when the
empirical evidence shows that when Democrats control the White House and
we’ve got a Democratic Congress, the economy does better; and when
they’re in charge, it does worse.”
Obama continued, “I mean, just look at the facts. Don’t take my word
for it. Go back and take a look at, all right, here’s Bill Clinton’s
presidency, and then there’s Bush presidency, and then there’s my
presidency, and take a look.”
So here we go, taking a look — and the view is nice, I’ll start off
with a quote sure to upset the Grumpy Cat doomsayers, “Today, the United
States has the strongest major economy in the world.”
More from the
NYTimes:
The (Republican) party still likes to invoke its success
under Ronald Reagan, who cut taxes after defeating Jimmy
Carter in 1980. By the mid-1980s, stagflation had turned into an
economic boom.
But neither of the two subsequent Republican pretenders fared as well
compared with their Democratic successors. That has left the cabal
vulnerable in three ways.
…
Growth has remained modest under President Obama, but unemployment
has dropped to 5.1 percent since the recession ended five months into
his term. The budget deficit as a percentage of the overall economy has
fallen to 2.5 percent from 9.8 percent.
A second problem for Republicans stems from their own rhetoric. Mr.
Clinton and Mr. Obama pushed through tax increases despite warnings from
partisan adversaries. Among many other Republicans, the current
pretender candidates Rubio, Cruz, Kasich and Jeb all denounced the “job-killing” consequences of Mr. Obama’s
policies.
Yet the economy gained 2.9 million jobs in 2014, more than in any
year since 1999, during Mr. Clinton’s term. Net job creation during the
15 years that Mr. Clinton and Mr. Obama occupied the White House has
topped 30 million. That is 50 percent more than were created in the 20
years of Mr. Reagan and both shrubs.
Republicans have been skating by on the already debunked notion that
they are the cabal of fiscal business. Under this misguided belief, they
have been treated as the experts on the economy. The media has gone
along with this for years, even though the data told a different story. The shrub’s eight years at the helm told the story of a cabal of
entitled, drunken frat boys racking up debt on daddy’s black card while
refusing to feed a starving relative for “moral” reasons.
President Obama isn’t running in 2016, but he can deliver a
devastating argument on behalf of Democrats in a way that few others
can. Nobody in the U.S. understands the Republican Twilight Zone better
than Obama. He has lived with it, challenged it, and defeated it
throughout his presidency.
