Obama Touts His Record

In his excellent daily Web news summary, “The Transom,” Ben Domenech says that President Obama’s speech at the Portland Museum of Art on Saturday “is likely to be Obama’s campaign speech from here on out.” He’s probably correct, so let’s take a look, with an eye to whether it’s likely to work.

Obama’s template is nothing new. He first repeats his claim as to the catastrophic conditions he inherited from President Bush. “It’s hard to remember sometimes how perilous things were when I was sworn in.”

So Obama took immediate action “to save the auto industry, to get the banks lending again” and to make sure state and local governments didn’t lay off teachers and first responders. Indeed, he moved so fast that “people didn’t fully appreciate the scope and magnitude of what got done in those first six months, that first year.”

He acknowledged he destroyed millions of jobs and presided over the worst unemployment rates in modern times, which at their best are still more than 60 percent higher than the norm and much worse when you factor in people who have quit looking for work. I mean he said that he “created almost 4 million jobs” and that “we have seen the unemployment rate start ticking down.” Companies, he said, “are hiring and investing again.”

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