Time for report card on Obama
The unemployment rate is now down to 5 percent, and an economy that was losing 800,000 jobs a month when Barack Obama was inaugurated has since added more than 10 million private-sector jobs.
The stock market, which seven years ago had lost 50 percent of its value in the greatest financial collapse in more than 80 years, is now 30 percent above its pre-recession peak. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has more than doubled, and corporate after-tax profits continue near all-time records.
According to numbers released this week by Gallup, the percentage of American adults under 65 without health insurance has dropped to 11 percent, down significantly from its pre-Obamacare peak. That number would be lower still if states such as Georgia (18 percent uninsured) had not stubbornly refused to expand Medicaid, denying help to hundreds of thousands of our fellow Georgians. The uninsured rates have dropped especially fast for black and Hispanic Americans, many of whom had never had access to health insurance and had no real hope of ever doing so.
The list goes on:
The nation’s economy has grown by 29 percent since 2009, and the federal deficit as a share of GDP is projected to drop to 3.3 percent this year, at or below the modern average and well below the range during the Reagan era, just to pick a time frame. Gasoline is $2 a gallon, inflation is almost non-existent, the dollar is strong and because of the availability of jobs, tens of thousands of previously discouraged Americans are rejoining the workforce every month.
All of these things were never supposed to happen, but they have happened. We’ve even uncovered Obama’s Hawaii birth certificate! (And isn’t it interesting that the birth of Ted Cruz in Canada hasn’t stirred anywhere near the controversy stirred by false claims of Obama’s Kenyan birth). I wonder what the explanation might be … .
Given all that, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Gallup also reports that a majority of Americans now approve of President Obama’s job performance, a rating well above the presidential average and also above that of President Reagan at the same point in his second term. Given that the hardcore GOP base comprises roughly a third of the electorate, that’s pretty impressive.
Think about all that, and then think about all the dire predictions of utter doom, societal collapse and destruction of democracy that have emanated from the Republican Party over the last eight years. Think about the irrational hatred and scorn directed at this man, the paranoid delusions about Obama’s anti-America intentions that have come not just from talk-radio hosts, Fox News (“terrorist fist bumps” anybody?) and far-right websites, but from leading figures in the Republican Party.
Think about what more might have been accomplished with an opposition party that was capable of compromise in the national interest, that had priorities other than ensuring that this president was an absolute and utter failure.
In short, we have a record. We have an extensive record of predictions, and we also have seven-plus years of reality against which to judge both those predictions and those who issued those predictions.
