Politics: Every once in a while on the campaign trail the talking points and Teleprompters are abandoned and the truth inadvertently slips out – as it did with Bill Clinton on Monday.
Stumping for his wife in Spokane, Wash., the former president said “people are upset, they’re anxiety-ridden, they’re disoriented.” Then he let heave this political grenade: “If you believe we've finally come to the point where we can put the awful legacy of the last eight years behind us, and the seven years before that where we were practicing trickle-down economics, then you should vote for her."
The Clinton team put out its usual lame spin that Bill’s less-than-flattering assessment of Obamanomics was taken out of context. What he meant to say, they explained, is that the “awful legacy of the last eight years” is due to all the “Republican obstructionism.” Yada, yada, yada.
But this isn’t the first or even second time Bill and Hillary have told the real story of Obama recovery, such as it is.
Hillary ran around the country last year saying middle-class Americans are angry because they’re “falling behind” financially. And just a few weeks ago we noted that Bill contradicted the Obama party line on the economy by grimly noting that “millions and millions of people look at that (Obama’s) pretty picture of America painted and cannot find themselves in it to save their lives. That explains everything.”
Sure does. We’ve noted many times that it’s been 10 years since the average American has seen a pay raise, that Census Bureau data show middle-class families have lost more than $1,000 in real income since Obama took office and that we're about six million jobs short of where we would be if we had a Reagan-style recovery.
Nearly every poll of the last three years shows that voters know this and feel it.
What’s fun is watching the dirty laundry of the ongoing Clinton-Obama feud aired in public. Bill Clinton’s constant jabs at Obama (and then the insincere apologies) are no doubt payback for the slaps that Obama takes at the economy of the last 30 years and thus Bill’s legacy. The White House riff is that inequality spiked during the 1980s and ’90s and only the rich got richer.
But most voters would take an ’80s- and ’90s-style prosperity in a New York minute over the dreary Obama years when the economy has limped along at 2%, the middle class has shrunk and inequality has grown wider. This is the sorry legacy of ObamaCare, $8 trillion of debt spending, tax increases on the rich and a regulatory blitzkrieg against business.
Strangely, while Bill accurately attacks Obamanomics as “awful,” Hillary is promising four more years of it.
