As President Obama’s second term nears its end he has begun a media tour emphasizing what he claims are the positive aspects of his policies. The complicit media, of course, have long worked to inflate positive impressions of Obama’s legacy, and this latest set of interviews is no different.
“In two recent interviews, with The New York Times Magazine on his economic legacy and with The Atlantic on his foreign policy legacy, Mr. Obama expressed a common sentiment: He had achieved big things and avoided even bigger mistakes, and yet most people just shrug,” wrote Mark Landler for The New York Times on April 28.
Landler writes that this may be because Obama describes his successes as negatives, that “without the steps he took—or didn’t take…things would have turned out so much worse.”
Saying that things could have been worse without Obama’s policy interventions is an argument based on counterfactual reasoning, as if the President could somehow know the future that he avoided.
Yet President Obama and the mainstream media have fooled each other enough for each to think that the public’s problem is that President Obama simply hasn’t explained himself well enough.
“‘How people feel about the economy’…is influenced by ‘what they hear,’” President Obama told the Times in Andrew Ross Sorkin’s April 28 lengthy feature touting Obama’s economic legacy. President Obama then went on to blame Republicans for constantly telling their base that the nation’s economy has not improved.
But even the Times had to admit in that article that average family incomes are “$4,000 less than…when Bill Clinton left office,” and that the nation faces growing economic inequality.
Read more:
http://www.academia.org/president-obamas-economic-legacy/
