https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/09/10/obama_comes_out_of_retirement_with_same_tired_message_138026.html
The Democrat establishment beckoned, and former President Obama appeared.
After months of desperate entreaties, highlighted by a summer New York magazine cover story titled “Barack Obama, Where Are You?,” Obama returned on Friday with a longwinded speech at the University of Illinois. It featured his greatest hits of identity politics, income redistribution, and tax-spend-and-regulate leftism.
Obama tried to rewrite history, claiming that his administration “returned the economy to healthy growth and initiated the longest streak of job creation on record,” “covered another 20 million Americans with health insurance,” and “cut our deficits by more than half, partly by making sure that people like me, who have been given such amazing opportunities by this country, pay our fair share of taxes to help folks coming up behind me.”
Reality check: Obama presided over the slowest economic recovery in American history, with the unemployment rate not falling back below 8 percent for good until his second term. While in office, the economy never hit 3 percent annual growth — the first president never to meet that threshold since Herbert Hoover.
Somewhere between most and virtually all of the new insured population came through the Obamacare provision to dramatically expand Medicaid — a deeply flawed program — to able bodied adults well above the poverty line.
Obama doubled the size of the national debt over his time in office. And the only reason why the deficit was cut was because Congressional Republicans valiantly opposed his spendthrift policy proposals. To top it off, he raised taxes, which — by taking money out of the private economy — did the opposite of helping “folks coming up behind.”
Even more galling than his revisionist history is his attempt to take credit for the current economy, which is the hottest in a generation. “When you hear how great the economy’s doing right now,” he protested, “let’s just remember when this recovery started. I mean, I’m glad it’s continued, but when you hear about this economic miracle that’s been going on, when the job numbers come out, monthly job numbers, suddenly Republicans are saying it’s a miracle. I have to kind of remind them, actually, those job numbers are the same as they were in 2015 and 2016.”