Surely one of the most debated questions for historians after President Barack Obama’s eight years of economic and foreign policy mismanagement will be whether he was a deceiver or just deceived.
That is, did he actually believe all the happy talk he and his press secretaries and officials constantly spewed? Or did he know they were telling lies but was determined to stick to their “Everything’s awesome!” narrative in the hope of eventually convincing the public and media?
My guess is he’s a deceiver, but I’ll concede that it’s possible he is so full of himself and insulated by like-minded yes-liberals that he’s been deceived. And of course, it’s possible he’s both.
We saw an example of this conundrum last week, in Obama’s brief White House statement after the U.S. Supreme Court, led by liberal Chief Justice John Roberts, upheld Obamacare’s subsidies in King v. Burwell.
The president told those listening, “This law is working exactly as it’s supposed to. In many ways, this law is working better than we expected it to.”
No honest defender of the Affordable Care Act can say it’s working “exactly as it was supposed to.” The president thought—or at least claimed he thought—people who liked their policies or their doctors could keep them. That didn’t happen. He claimed it would get everyone covered, but there are still some 30 million uninsured. Indeed, the man has unilaterally postponed parts of Obamacare 32 times, according to the Galen Institute, because it wasn’t working the way he thought it would.
And his most bizarre comment: that premiums are $1,800 a year less expensive than they would have been without the law.
As multiple news stories reported the past few months—not to mention the past few years—that health insurance premiums were going up significantly, a reporter asked Josh Earnest about those double-digit premium increases. He explained, “[T]hose rate increases are reviewed by state regulators. And the result typically has been that after that state review is conducted, that insurance companies would slash their rates.”
Actually, prior to the ACA, how and whether states reviewed premium increases varied by state. Under the ACA regulators do have the power to stop and modify increases. And there will be increasing political pressure on those regulators to scale back premium increase requests, both because increases mean the government will spend more on subsidies and because they make a mockery of Obama’s claims.
But Earnest’s effort to slough off the rate-increase question isn’t fooling most people, who are paying much higher premiums.
On foreign policy, Obama said last February:
We’re disrupting their [ISIS] command and control and supply lines, making it harder for them to move. We’re destroying their fighting positions, their tanks, their vehicles, their barracks, their training camps, and the oil and gas facilities and infrastructure that fund their operations. We’re taking out their commanders, their fighters, and their leaders.
Does that look like the headlines you’ve been reading?
And then there’s the nuclear agreement with Iran, the so-called P5+1 talks. When Obama Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes explained how the nuclear agreement—one under which Obama is caving at every opportunity—could lead to a “much more stable region” in the Middle East, the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stevens asked, “So what’s more frightening: That Mr. Rhodes believes what he’s saying? Or that he does not?”
I find myself asking that question about Obama administration statements all the time.
And I’m not the only one. It’s clear that the media know that Obama officials are spouting nonsense—and are rolling their eyes are smirking in response. After State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki recently proclaimed the Obama narrative on Egypt, the media clearly thought her comments were ludicrous. And so did she; she was caught by a hot microphone saying, “That Egypt line is ridiculous.”
Yes, it was. And it simply gives more weight to the conclusion that Obama is a deceiver as opposed to deceived.