During a rally in Milwaukee this past Monday, democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton tied voter anger during this year's election cycle to the 2008 recession and reminded the crowd there about the economic damage done during the Bush administration and the fact that President Obama deserves credit for digging us out of the ditch he inherited when he first took office:
During a rally in Milwaukee, the Democratic presidential front-runner pointed to the record of her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and blamed Republicans for hurting the progress made during his tenure.
"Well, look at what happened to us: We had a balanced budget and a surplus, plus all those jobs, plus that rising income," Clinton said at the rally ahead of the state’s primary next Tuesday.
"We were coming together as a nation, and they reversed everything," Clinton added. "They went back to trickle-down economics."
Clinton noted how many jobs were lost during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and cautioned voters to be wary of the GOP candidates' rhetoric as they campaign throughout Wisconsin.
"They’re angry because of what happened to them, their families, their friends, their neighbors. People saw it, they felt it," Clinton said.
"We are back on the right track, and I don’t think President Obama gets the credit he deserves for digging us out of that ditch," she added.
So how did the yakkers on Fox's Bulls & Bears react to Clinton's speech? By complaining that President Obama hasn't done enough to repair the damage, while ignoring the fact that he's had an obstructionist Congress to deal with for his entire presidency other than the very brief period between the day Al Franken was finally sworn into office and the day Ted Kennedy passed away, who was eventually replaced by Sen. Scott Brown.
Here's regular Gary B. Smith pretending that President Obama was some sort of king that didn't have to water down the stimulus package due to Republican intransigence, and ignoring the fact that they've done everything in their power to damage any economic recovery because they were more worried about making Obama a one term president.
SMITH: You know Dagen, listening to that clip, I thought we all were like suspended in time for the last eight years as if we didn't elect a new president, Congress didn't change. Nothing's changed. It's still, and it will always be George Bush and 2008 forever and ever. Look, it's not the recession. Look, what happened at the end of 2008, we threw the Republicans out of the presidency and since then it been all Obama. And what have we reaped since then? A few things. The worst economic recovery in the last fifty years.
People care Dagen about three things; do they have money in their pockets, do they have a job and they care about their house. Well, look at those three things. We got median household income has been flat for eight years. Median wages are flat. We've got a labor force participation that has dropped about four percent. We've got housing that is down about four percent in terms of how many people own houses in this country. I'm looking for the good news here.
Even this past Friday where we had this terrific jobs report. Seventy five percent of those jobs are minimum wage jobs. This is a horrible recovery. That's why people are angry.
A little later in the segment, to add insult to injury, guest host Dagen McDowell blamed Bill Clinton, not George W. Bush who ignored the warnings about bin Laden, for being responsible for the terrorist attacks on 9-11.
MCDOWELL: And Suzy, she also left out something called the terror attack on on 9-11, making us vulnerable because the Clinton administration did not protect this country. Is that part of it, and what blame does President Obama deserve?
WELCH: Look, people get mad and the electorate on both sides is mad right now. Democrats are mad and Republicans are mad. That's why there are outsider candidates for both parties. People get mad when two things happen; when they're scared, and that's the terror attack part of it, and when they're um... and when they feel cheated. And that's what John and Gary were talking about. People feel cheated. And what do they feel cheated about? They feel cheated out of the American dream and the American dream is that if you worked hard, and you played by the rules, you would have a better life than your parents.
McDowell and Smith continued the pile on by of course, blaming regulation, rather than a lack of it for all of our financial woes.
MCDOWELL: But Gary B. there has to be responsibility on someone's shoulders and that is the President of the United States, who raised taxes, who ripped up the health care industry, who ripped up the financial industry, that's put coal out of business, reregulated the Internet and nationalized student loans and what do we have to show for it? Not a whole lot.
SMITH: Exactly Dagen. This squarely falls on the Obama administration, and for the left to say that this has been yeah, an okay recovery. Even Jonas, who we don't specifically view as a leftie, for him to say, “Oh, it worked for three fifths of the country” or didn't work for three fifths of the country, we've had a growth per capita, GDP growth rate that was half of under Reagan. If it had been at even seventy five percent of what we achieved under Reagan, we'd be going great guns right now.
More snake oil from the people who don't want us to have any sort of minimum wage at all and who love a race to the bottom on wages with third world countries. They hate unions, hate any type of regulation and want to let the free markets prevail. Dodd-Frank and the ACA didn't go far enough with curing all of our problems. But instead of fixing either of them, these jokers want to shred them up and leave these industries completely unregulated. Don't dare blame Republicans for any of their policies when things go to hell, though.
In Fox world, Democrats are always completely to blame for everything, trickle-down works, and all would be right with the world if we just elected a few more mythical St. Ronnies that only exist in right-wing revisionist history to office.
