WELCOME TO FANTASY ISLAND:
“Obama Takes Credit For ‘Saving the World Economy From a Great Depression,’” Tom Blumer wrote yesterday at NewsBusters. “At a townhall in London, Obama was asked: ‘After eight years, what would you say you want your legacy to be?’ Here was his response, as it related to the ‘world economy,’” Blumer writes, quoting the semi-retired president telling his London audience:
There are things I’m proud of. The basic principle that in a country as wealthy as the United States, every person should have access to high-quality health care that they can afford — that’s something I’m proud of, I believe in. (Applause.) Saving the world economy from a Great Depression — that was pretty good. (Laughter and applause.)
The first time I came to London was April of 2009, and the world economy was in a free fall, in part because of the reckless behavior of folks on Wall Street, but in part because of reckless behavior of a lot of financial institutions around the globe. For us to be able to mobilize the world community to take rapid action to stabilize the financial markets, and then in the United States to pass Wall Street reforms that make it much less likely that a crisis like that can happen again, I’m proud of that.
Ahem:
Listen to the president and one would think that he was in office during the financial crisis that began on September 15, 2008. For the nth time, Obama reminded the nation on 60 Minutes of the financial meltdown he inherited. That is his usual way of suggesting to the American people that they could hardly hope for normal times after six years of his own governance. In truth, Obama entered office on January 20, 2009 — over four months after the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that precipitated a general financial meltdown.
One would not expect Obama to fault past liberal congressional intervention in the financial sector that in large part forced the issuance of subprime risky mortgages, much less the earlier deregulation of the financial industry under Bill Clinton that helped fueled the rampant speculation. The videos of the sad congressional banter about supposedly insensitive questioning of the duplicitous and corrupt Fannie head Franklin Raines, or the self-important bluster of former Rep. Barney Frank, make a good 10-minute tutorial on the meltdown — namely how Wall Street sharks, hand-in-glove with liberal congressional operatives and Clinton appointees, offered federally “guaranteed” mortgages to those who had no ability to pay them back, fueling a phony real estate boom and overvalued stock market.
Obama might at least admit that when he entered office the panic had largely passed. The tools needed to deal with it that he embraced had months earlier been implemented by someone else. Indeed, Obama was president for just a few months before the recession that began in December 2007 ended in June 2009 — well before the effect of any of the policies, good or bad, could have taken effect.
Our current economic mess — the worst post-recession recovery since World War II, more people out of work than when Obama took office, a steady decline in real family income, massive new debt — is largely a result of his own policies of five consecutive $1 trillion deficits, the Obamacare catastrophe, new burdensome and capricious regulations, near-zero interest rates, and the anti-business psychological climate brought on by constant hectoring of the “you did not build that” and “at a certain point you’ve made enough money” sort.
—“Welcome to Fantasy Island,” Victor Davis Hanson October 5, 2014.
As Blumer concluded his article yesterday:
After setting up the conditions in February 2009 for an extended recession and historically weak recovery in the U.S., the idea Obama went to Europe two months later in April and then began “saving the world” is a sick joke only gullible, economics-ignorant reporters and leftists could possibly believe. Sadly, they’re the ones who still primarily control the news and other key institutions, so we’ll probably be hearing this crap for years on end — just like we’ve had to put up with the fiction that Franklin Delano Roosevelt saved the country from the Great Depression in the 1930s. The truth is that he lengthened it by seven years.
It took decades to overcome the all-encompassing myth created by leftist historians that FDR magically “saved” the economy in the 1930s. At least FDR’s rep was salvaged by winning World War II; in contrast, the scrotal-torque level of spin from Obama’s palace guard media and historians in the coming years will be staggering to watch – and push back against.
