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Jan. 23, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
24:12
Ep. 239 - Obama's Final Presser! Get Out, Dude.
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According to Lanny Davis, former special counsel to President Clinton and longtime Democratic consultant, Barack Obama will be considered one of history's great presidents.
What makes Obama so spectacular?
Well, according to Davis, to be a great president requires a combination of four factors.
First, unique circumstances making a major impact on the nation's history, like Washington and Jefferson as framers and setting important precedents for the presidency for future generations.
Second, Successfully addressing one or more major national crises, Lincoln with the Civil War, or FDR with World War II.
Third, having significant positive impacts on economic and social changes or on foreign policy.
And fourth, enhancing the powers and effectiveness of the presidency and the future of their political parties.
Davis then goes ahead and ranks his top-tier presidents.
He says those are Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Teddy, and FDR.
And he lists his second-tier presidents, Monroe, Pope, McKinley, Wilson, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan, Clinton.
So, where does Obama stack up in all of this?
According to Davis, quote, there is little doubt that future historians will rank him high in this second tier.
What were Obama's accomplishments?
Obamacare, quote, digging the country out of an economic Great Recession, and his election as the first black president.
That's the whole thing.
And that's pretty weak.
So here's where Obama actually stacks up on these four factors.
First, unique circumstances.
Obama did face a severe economic downturn when he assumed office.
That is not that rare in American history.
According to 247wallstreet.com, America has had either depressions or recessions.
In 1797 under Adams, 1807 under Jefferson, 1815 to 1821 under Madison and Monroe.
1837 under Van Buren, 1857 under Buchanan, 1873 under Grant, 1893 under Cleveland, 1907 under Teddy, 1920 and 21 under Harding, the Great Depression under Hoover and FDR, 1973 under Nixon, and the Carter years and early Reagan years.
Which leaves aside the stock market crashes under Reagan, the mild economic downturn under George H.W.
Bush, and the bursting of the internet bubble under Bill Clinton.
So, the question isn't, did he actually experience a downturn, it's what he did with that.
He proceeded to lead, Obama did, one of the worst recoveries in American history.
Second, successfully addressing one or more national crises.
This is the second criteria.
Davis gives Obama credit for addressing the Great Recession, although his recovery was tepid at best, actually the worst since the Great Depression.
Average annual growth has been the weakest since 1949, at just 2.1% growth per year.
The expansion has been long, but it's been seriously underproductive.
On foreign policy, Obama has exacerbated national crises surrounding terror, presided over a massive increase in the number of terror attacks on American soil.
He's also presided over the collapse of race relations in the United States.
When he took office, two out of three Americans thought race relations were good.
He leaves office with nearly two in three Americans thinking precisely the reverse.
A good president has significant impacts on domestic reform policy.
Obama's biggest domestic policy achievement, Obamacare, has increased costs and premiums, thrown Americans off their preferred insurance plans, and separated them from their doctors, all while overburdening medical care providers and placing insurance companies under the financial gun.
It will be repealed as soon as Obama's gone.
His immigration policy has left millions of illegal immigrants adrift.
His foreign policy has been a series of appeasements and blunders resulting in the rise of ISIS, a genocide in Syria, the unilateral surrender of Iraq, the incompetent prosecution of the war in Afghanistan, the regional empowerment and global legitimization of the Iranian terror regime, the creation of a dictatorship in Turkey, the empowerment of a dictatorship in Russia, the expansion of Chinese power.
He's weakened American allies all around the globe.
Fourth, Fourth factor, enhancing the future of the presidency and his political party.
The presidency is more powerful now than it was under Obama's predecessors, but that's not a particularly good measure of greatness since he'll be handing over that power to Donald Trump.
And Obama has devastated his political party.
He's lost nearly a thousand seats across the country for his party.
His party controls just 18 governorships.
He's lost the Senate, he's lost the House, he's lost the White House.
The Democrats are in the weakest position they've occupied since 1920 on the state level.
And no, Barack Obama doesn't just get extra credit because he's black.
So, where does Obama stack up historically?
It's actually kind of rare that historians rank two-term presidents among the nation's worst.
The only two-term president often included in that list is W, and that's largely due to the economic collapse of 2007-2008.
If not for that, he'd probably be somewhere in the middle.
In all likelihood, Obama will rank slightly above Jimmy Carter, but below Richard Nixon.
Historians will probably place him above George W., but well below Bill Clinton or even LBJ.
He'll rank as a rotten president, not the worst ever, but certainly not among the best.
Which is fitting.
In the end, Obama was kind of forgettable.
He was a forgettable president domestically.
He was a disastrous term.
He was a disastrous president in terms of foreign policy.
History is not going to treat him kindly.
He'll fade into obscurity rather than growing into historical prominence.
Which, actually, is probably his worst nightmare.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So many feelings!
Ah, Obama is finally leaving.
Donald Trump is becoming president.
So much confusion.
So much chaos.
So much excitement.
So much to talk about.
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Okay, so, as I say, lots of feelings.
Just joy that Barack Obama is leaving.
Like, that is a wonderful, wonderful thing.
Barack Obama has been a barnacle on the ass of the United States for eight years.
He's been awful.
He's been just an abscess in terms of politics for the entirety of his term, and it is great to see him leave.
I am very, very happy about that.
We'll go through his final press conference and savor every last minute of angst and upset that Barack Obama can leverage.
First, I do have to note, Donald Trump Today, he's headed to Washington, D.C.
to prepare for the inauguration, which happens tomorrow.
This time tomorrow, if you're listening right now, by this time tomorrow, Donald Trump will be not president-elect, he'll be president of the United States.
And there's pictures of him getting off the military jet with Melania and saluting the troops, which is nice, because you feel like he actually likes the troops as opposed to the president we currently have in office.
I will say this.
If you're watching Donald Trump, the guy from The Apprentice, become President of the United States, and you don't feel at least a little bit of trepidation about that, it's because you're not watching closely enough.
And I'm going to talk a little bit later about what we can expect from Trump, and what our hopes should be, and what we should actually look for from Donald Trump.
I will just say this in summary.
Here is how I'm feeling about Donald Trump taking office tomorrow.
Yeah, that's pretty much it.
I think that we can be, as I like to say, optimistically skeptical.
We should be skeptical of every... Listen, I've been very skeptical.
I was skeptical of Bush.
I was very skeptical of Obama.
I'm going to be skeptical of Trump.
I'm skeptical of all politicians because politicians are in the business of lying to you for money.
That's what they do for a living.
So if you trust Donald Trump, let me just recommend to you that Donald Trump is, again, a politician.
He shifted his positions a lot.
Hold his feet to the fire.
But we'll get to that in just a second.
First, we have to celebrate, because it's a day of celebration.
Today is Barack Obama's final day in office.
Yay!
Woo!
Very, very exciting stuff.
Barack Obama has been disastrous president of the United States.
What's amazing is watching as Democrats struggle with this, CNN ran a story desperately hoping that Donald Trump would actually be assassinated, really.
Because they hoped that if he were assassinated and the rest of the cabinet that Trump has picked were assassinated, they haven't actually been voted on yet.
So there's nobody in the cabinet yet.
If you assassinate Trump and you assassinate Pence, then right now, as it goes, Barack Obama remains, he's still the president today.
So if he killed Trump and Pence today, this is seriously what CNN reported.
Here is what the CNN report looked like.
And while officials stress there's no specific credible threat to this inauguration, tonight, due to a quirk in America's rules for succession, questions remain about just who would be in charge if an attack hit the incoming president, vice president, and congressional leaders just as the transfer of power is underway.
Here you have a very confusing line of succession.
According to the Constitution, if the President and Vice President are killed or incapacitated, next in line is the House Speaker, then the President pro tempore of the Senate.
But what if something happened to them at the inauguration, too?
After that, it goes down the list of cabinet secretaries, starting with Secretary of State.
On the day of the inauguration, as a precaution, a cabinet secretary called the Designated Presidential Successor will not attend the inauguration, ready to step in if something happens.
But it won't be a Trump cabinet secretary, since none of them have been confirmed yet.
It will be an Obama appointee.
So if Obama and Biden were killed, and then if Trump and Pence were killed before the inauguration, it would have to happen before the inauguration, right?
They're basically saying, well, you know what could happen, theoretically, what if Trump and Pence died, and Obama and Biden died, John Kerry would become president.
I mean, this is like, this is insanity.
So they're now living in this crazy fantasy world.
And let's face it, okay, everyone's in some sort of bizarre fever dream here, because there was a story today that Donald Trump at the inauguration might dance with Caitlyn Jenner.
Okay, I'm just gonna say, I don't know what the hell is going on.
I don't know what's happening.
If that actually happens, well I guess that would be kind of a fitting capstone to 2016 when nothing made any sense and we're pretty much living inside God's burp right now, but...
Let's just focus for a second, instead of getting into the Trump stuff, which is a lot of fun, let's focus on something else fun, which is Barack Obama leaving.
So, Obama's preparing to get out.
Good, don't let the door hit you on the way out.
And he gives this press conference yesterday, and the final presser is just the press licking him.
I mean, it's just the press doing its best to give him that final send-off he's been waiting for, give him that happy ending.
So, here is Barack Obama We are the only country in the advanced world that makes it harder to vote rather than easier.
And that dates back.
There's an ugly history to that that we should not be shy about talking about.
Voting rights?
Here's what Obama had to say about that.
We are the only country in the advanced world that makes it harder to vote rather than easier.
And that dates back.
There's an ugly history to that that we should not be shy about talking about.
Voting rights?
Yes, I'm talking about voting rights.
The reason that we are the only country among advanced democracies that makes it harder to vote is...
So President Obama on his way out, he's still riffing on Jim Crow, which ended in the 1960s.
And And in talking about how voting rights are being impinged.
He still cannot name a single instance in which a black person has been turned away from the polls illegitimately.
He still can't name a single instance of that across the country.
So while the left claims that voter fraud has never happened and will never happen without any evidence, they also claim that there's an attempt, a market attempt to get black people to stop voting.
Which again has no evidence to support it.
But he's not done there.
Barack Obama is asked specifically about Julian Assange because yesterday he released Chelsea Manning, the WikiLeaks traitor.
And so he's asked about Julian Assange, and here was Obama's answer about Assange.
I don't pay a lot of attention to Mr. Assange's tweets, so that wasn't a consideration in this instance.
And I'd refer you to the Justice Department for Uh, any criminal investigations, indictments, extradition issues, uh, that may come up.
...doesn't pay any attention to Assange's tweets except for the fact that he thinks that WikiLeaks affected the election, and Julian Assange is the head of WikiLeaks, so there's that as well.
Obama also couldn't leave without riffing on race and talking about how America's racially divided.
It's more racially divided than when he took office because he blew his opportunity as the first black president to bring everybody together, instead using race-baiting as a political tool and tactic.
Here's Barack Obama on race relations as he leaves.
And by the way, it's no longer a black and white issue alone.
You've got Hispanic folks and you've got Asian folks.
This is not just the same old battles.
We've got this stew that's bubbling up of people from everywhere.
I've got a stoop.
Lots of people.
It's not very tasty.
This stoop.
Because I'm not going to be there to spice it.
This stoop.
Again, he's now trying to make race relations more complicated on his way out, just as he has during his administration.
He also defended his commutation of Chelsea Manning's prison sentence, his decision to free the person who was responsible for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks, which resulted in the endangerment of American soldiers and American allies.
Here's Obama defending that yesterday.
First of all, Let's be clear, Chelsea Manning has served a tough prison sentence.
So the notion that the average person who was thinking about disclosing vital classified information would think that it goes unpunished I don't think would get that impression from the sentence that Chelsea Manning has served.
It has been my view that given she went to trial, that due process was carried out, that she took responsibility for her crime, that This that she received was
Very disproportionate relative to what other leakers had received.
Okay, so we can stop it there.
Get the F out, dude.
I mean, when you're talking about Chelsea Manning having served this really, really harsh sentence, it was a 35-year sentence.
Chelsea Manning served 7 to 8 years and was given hormone treatments by the federal government because Chelsea Manning thinks he is a woman.
Barack Obama then frees Chelsea Manning and we're supposed to believe that that doesn't send a signal to leakers that you're basically going to get away with it?
The most laugh-worthy line of all of this, though, was when Barack Obama starts talking to the press.
Because this is just, this is just... If you don't spit your coffee listening to this line, it's only because you're not drinking coffee.
Here's Obama.
You're not supposed to be sycophants.
You're supposed to be skeptics.
You're supposed to ask me tough questions.
You're not supposed to be complimentary.
But you're supposed to cast a critical eye on folks who hold enormous power.
And make sure that we are accountable to the people who sent us here.
And you have done that.
And you've done it, for the most part, in ways that I could appreciate for fairness, even if I didn't always agree with your conclusions.
And having you in this building has made This place work better.
The press has treated Obama with kid gloves the entirety of his presidency.
And the press has been very, very kind to him.
Even as he's leaving, all of these major outlets are putting out tributes to him.
Your favorite pictures of Barack Obama.
Actually, my favorite picture of Barack Obama has yet to be taken.
It's the one of him leaving.
But they say that they hear all the pictures of him and his beautiful family.
Here are all the great moments that you don't remember from Barack Obama's presidency.
Here's how sad we are.
BuzzFeed did this.
They did a whole thing about how sad they were that Barack Obama was leaving.
And then he says the press has just been really tough on him.
No, this is just an excuse for him to say that the press should be tough on Trump.
And they will be tough on Trump.
In fact, they'll be crazy about Trump.
So this is a pretty nutty story from today.
The Washington Post ran a story about Sonny Perdue.
And this story about Sonny Perdue, he's the new pick for agriculture secretary under Trump.
And here is the headline the Washington Post ran.
Sonny Perdue is a former two-term governor of Georgia.
Here is the headline from the Washington Post.
Trump picks former Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue, who once led a prayer for rain, for Agriculture Secretary.
I think it's clip 21 here, if you want to see that headline.
So, the headline here is that, here it is, you can see it right there on the bottom.
Trump picks former Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue, who once led a prayer for rain for Agriculture Secretary.
Not two-term Georgia Governor, first Georgia Republican Governor in 130 years, No, the guy who led a prayer for rain.
Because that's how much the press hates conservatives, hates Republicans, hates religious people.
That's how the press is going to treat Trump.
But the way that they treated Obama was just with kid gloves.
By the way, it really is quite disgusting.
The press does not understand why anyone would pray for rain.
Every major religion has times when you pray for weather events.
That doesn't mean that you're going to get them, by the way.
But the left doesn't understand how prayer works.
And so they scorn all of this.
And that's one of the reasons why Trump is going to be inaugurated as president tomorrow, is specifically because Of all of this.
So, Barack Obama's leaving.
I don't actually want to waste more time talking.
We cut a bunch of clips and then I realized that I'm bored with him and I'm just excited to see him leave.
So, he's actually, he'll be going, thank God, but the Democrats are not going to be going.
And the Democrats are going to continue to push forward a narrative that really is counterproductive.
Bernie Sanders, I think, led this one off and then we'll have to break.
Bernie Sanders led this one off.
He was questioning The Tom Price, the health and human services secretary, potential secretary.
Listen to what Bernie Sanders has to say.
If this is the new democratic tech, it's no wonder they're losing elections in landslides across the country.
The United States of America is the only major country on Earth that does not guarantee health care to all people as a right.
Canada does it, every major country in Europe does it.
Do you believe that health care is a right of all Americans, whether they're rich or they're poor?
Should people, because they are Americans, be able to go to the doctor when they need to, be able to go into a hospital because they are Americans?
Yes, we're a compassionate society.
No, we're not a compassionate society.
In terms of our relationship to poor and working people, our record is worse than virtually any other country on earth.
We have the highest rate of childhood poverty of any other major country on earth.
And half of our senior older workers have nothing set aside for retirement.
So I don't think, compared to other countries, we are particularly compassionate.
But my question is, in Canada, in other countries, all people have the right to get healthcare.
Do you believe we should move in that direction?
If you want to talk about other countries' healthcare systems, there are consequences to the decisions that they've made, just as there are consequences to the decisions that we've made.
I believe, and I look forward to working with you, to make certain that every single American has access to the highest quality care and coverage that is possible.
As access to does not mean that they are guaranteed health care.
I have access to buying a ten million dollar home.
I don't have the money to do that.
And that's why we believe it's appropriate to put in place a system that gives every person the financial feasibility to be able to purchase the coverage that they want for themselves and for their family.
Let me stop there.
The part that's really telling here is where Bernie Sanders just lashes out.
No, we are not a compassionate society.
Sure, we're compassionate enough to put me in the Senate for a thousand terms even though I'm 1,000 years old and completely senile and have never done anything useful in my entire life.
Sure.
You give me a pudding cup every so often and tell me to stand in the closet.
Sure you do that!
But we're not a compassionate society.
Okay, that's such utter nonsense.
America is by far the most generous society on the face of the earth.
Americans out-donate Britain and Canada 2 to 1, nations like Italy and Germany 20 to 1, according to the Almanac of American Philanthropy.
Every single income class, except those earning less than $25,000, more than half of the people in that income class in the United States donate to charity.
That top 1% that Bernie Sanders loves to hate?
They give one-third of all charity given in the United States.
The wealthiest 1.4% of Americans are responsible for 86% of all charitable donations made at death.
More Americans give charity than vote for presidents of the United States.
As far as, are we a compassionate society?
America's growing economy, our blockbuster economy, has made the world rich.
We have sliced global extreme poverty in half in the last 25 years thanks to the American economy.
We've freed people all over the world.
We've sacrificed American lives, hundreds of thousands of American lives, to free Japan, France, Norway, Austria, Greece, Denmark, Korea, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, Germany itself.
Bernie Sanders, by the way, he spent that time making friends with communists in Nicaragua.
By the way, as far as poverty in the United States, here's a few research from last year on poverty in the United States.
The U.S.
stands head and shoulders above the rest of the world.
More than half of Americans were high income by the global standard.
Another 32% were upper middle income.
In other words, almost 9 in 10 Americans had a standard of living that was above the global middle income standard.
How about the American poor?
Are they really hard off?
Are they having a hard time?
Certainly not compared to global standards, but not even according to basic standards of what you would consider super poor.
Some 96% of poor parents in the United States report their children were never hungry at any time in the prior year.
A poor child in the United States is more likely to have cable TV, a computer, a widescreen plasma TV, an Xbox, or a TiVo in their home than to be hungry.
Poor Americans have more living space in their homes than the average non-poor Swede, Frenchman, or German, according to the Heritage Foundation.
And then you heard Sanders say that our old people, they don't have savings.
One of the reasons they don't have a lot of savings is because they have Social Security.
People don't save because they think Social Security is their savings plan.
The fact is, according to Andrew Biggs and Sylvester Schreiber in the Wall Street Journal, despite a supposedly stingy social security program and ineffective retirement savings vehicles, the average U.S.
retiree has an income equal to 92% of the average American income, handily outpacing the Scandinavian countries 81%, Germany 85%, Belgium 77%, and many others.
And by the way, that's more money since our average income is actually higher than the average income in those other countries.
It's also worth noting again that Social Security eats up a huge chunk of our budget.
But if this is the play that Democrats are going to make, if this is the way that they're going to campaign from here on in, that Americans are stingy and terrible, it's no wonder that Donald Trump is going to become president tomorrow.
And Donald Trump should have an easy ride of it if this is the direction in which Democrats and the left are going to move.
Now we have to break here, but we have much more to discuss.
I want to talk about what we can expect from the incoming Trump administration.
You know, how we should treat the incoming Trump administration.
Plus, we have the mailbag coming as well.
So we'll talk about all of that.
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