President Obama is very proud of himself. And he said so last night at a fundraiser in California.
"We're at a critical time in our history, and that is a cliché, but this time it's really true. We have done really good, important work. And I say 'we' purposely because I could not have done it alone. I couldn't have done it without the support of a lot of the people in this room. But we have gone from a world economic crisis, a world financial crisis, two wars, a diminished standing for the United States around the world to 67 straight months of job creation, an unemployment rate of 5.1 percent, the most job openings ever recorded," Obama bragged.
"We have doubled the production of clean energy; cut our consumption of oil in half; solar power 20 times more today than when we took office; wind power three times more. We've cut the deficit by two-thirds. We're growing faster than every other large advanced nation on Earth. Reading scores are up; college enrollment is up; 17 million people have health insurance that didn’t have it before.
"There’s almost no measure by which we're not better off now than we were when I came into office."
Obama then pivoted and attacked Republicans:
"But what is also true is that during this time, some big problems haven’t fully gotten solved. Most prominently, the fact that wages and incomes for ordinary Americans are still flat, which makes people feel insecure and anxious and uncertain as to whether their kids are going to do better than they did. And when people are anxious economically, the politics of fear oftentimes can override the politics of hope.
"And so what we see -- most prominently in the presidential campaigns, but what we're seeing in the struggles taking place in the House -- is that politics of fear being fanned and expanding. And it can express itself in anti-immigration rhetoric. It can express itself in hunkering back on the need to take care of folks who are vulnerable, or to provide more opportunity for people who’ve been locked out of the American Dream. It can express itself in sort of cheap jingoism and militarism and nationalism that's not grounded in our national security interests. But it's a dangerous path. And it's a path that, during certain intervals in our history, we have taken when people feel insecure. And there’s this other path, and that's the politics of hope."