Obama Gives Hypocritical ‘State of Democracy’ Speech

Former President Barack Obama just concluded a “State of Democracy” speech to debut his 2018 midterm election message and provide his most direct rebuke of the Trump administration to date.

He began his speech by trying to reclaim some credit for President Trump’s spectacular economy. “By the time I left office, household income was near its all-time high, and the uninsured rate hit an all-time low, poverty rates were falling,” Obama said. “I mention this just so when you hear how great the economy is doing right now, let’s just remember when this recovery started.”

Most economists give credit for our current economic landscape to Trump. While there’s no doubt that Trump was handed a recovering economy, it would’ve remained in the relatively-sedated state it was in Obama’s last year, if he were magically granted a third term. We also wouldn’t have seen the historic 400% surge in black-owned businesses like we did over the past year. The economic gap between blacks and whites grew under Obama – and has narrowed under Trump.

More directly rebuking Trump, Obama criticized Trump for attacking a media that never reports a positive thing about his administration. “I complained plenty about Fox News, but I never threatened to shut them down,” Obama said.

Most couldn’t help but see the irony. Not only did Obama’s IRS explicitly target conservative-oriented groups, Obama did target Fox News! The Justice Department spied extensively on Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2010. That included collecting his phone records, tracking his movements, and seizing some of his personal emails.

And as Katie Pavlich pointed out, the Obama administration prosecuted more journalists’ sources than all other Presidents combined.

At another point in the speech, Obama called for single payer healthcare, or socialized medicine.

If there’s an admission that ObamaCare was a failure, that’s it. If ObamaCare was so great, why the need to entirely overhaul America’s private healthcare system? Obama must either concede that ObamaCare failed – or that critics were right that it would be a stepping stone to single payer.

Obama also hit Trump’s wall, giving perhaps the weakest case against it to date. His reasoning? That a wall won’t prevent terrorism and disease…. so we shouldn’t have one to prevent illegal immigration. That’s seriously his “logic.”

One thing we do know about walls though, is that they tend to prevent illegal immigration…. which is the point.

There were some moments of sanity, however, such as when Obama railed against the sort of identity politics his party has adopted. “We won’t win people over by calling them names or dismissing entire chunks of the country as racist, or sexist, or homophobic,” he told the crowd.

Of course, Obama engaged in that same kind of divisive politics, but he’s at least since realized how devastating it’s been to his party. When it comes to white male millennials, Democrats polled in that demographic 12 percentage points above Republicans in 2016. Just two years later, white male millennials favor Republicans by 11 percentage points, a staggering 23 point move.

The rest of the Democratic Party has yet to realize that – and sometimes tells me they won’t wake up regarding that fact during the next two months.

Thank God for that.