Every president when running for reelection comes up with very specific metrics to tout his success. Barack Obama seems to be doing so in a very unusual fashion--completely ignoring the first one-third of his presidency and focusing only on the last two-thirds. Why? Byron York takes a look:
Obviously, the president is trying to make his record look better; his first months in the White House saw devastating job losses and economic misery. Yet most of what Obama accomplished domestically also occurred in that unmentioned period.
In fact, March 2010 just happened to be the month in which the president's signature achievement, the national health care program known as Obamacare, became law.
It came at a time when Americans were desperate for Obama to devote all of his attention to fixing the economy and helping create jobs. What is sometimes forgotten today is that, at the time, the president and his allies in Congress argued that passing Obamacare was, in fact, the most important thing they could do to create jobs.
Democrats had wanted to pass national health care for generations. But faced with a terrible economic crisis, they were pressed to explain why they were spending time on health care rather than the economy. So after passing the $826 billion stimulus in February 2009 (another accomplishment of the lost period that sometimes goes unmentioned), they began to argue that passing the health care bill was critical for economic recovery.
Obamacare, they claimed, was really a jobs bill.
With Obamacare persistently unpopular and potentially about to be thrown out by the U.S. Supreme Court, it's no wonder that portion of space-time seems to have mysteriously vanished.
