For all his soaring rhetoric, former President Barack Obama really is nothing more than a typical, cheap Washington politician brimming with false promises. And Joe Biden is even worse. He is Barack Obama minus the pretty talk.
Which is why Mr. Obama is working furiously now to paper over the nasty split inside the Democratic Party over picking Mr. Biden to be its nominee for president. For the second time in a row, the party poobahs pulled out all the stops to block Sen. Bernie Sanders, the socialist from Vermont, from being their party’s standard-bearer in November.
“If you look at Joe Biden’s goals and Bernie Sanders’ goals, they’re not that different from a 40,000-foot level,” Mr. Obama told the New Yorker magazine.
“They both want to make sure everybody has health care. They want to make sure everybody can get a job that pays a living wage. They want to make sure every child gets a good education,” he said.
Really? Is that so, Mr. Obama?
And Republican voters want people to not have health care? They want people unemployed? They want people to make so little money that they cannot live? They cannot feed their family? And they want children to be uneducated?
Are you really that stupid, Mr. Obama, or are you that dishonest? Seriously, which is it?
Either you are dumber than a rock, or you are a flat-out liar.
Truth is, Republicans also want everyone to have health care, they want everyone to be gainfully and profitably employed, and they want every child to get a good education. The difference is how that best gets accomplished.
You believe that the federal government is the answer to every problem. Republicans understand the sober reality that the federal government simply cannot accomplish these goals. You are peddling false promises that you know — or should know — are dishonest promises.
Republicans, meanwhile, believe that individuals and the free market are the best way to accomplish these things.
Take health care, for instance.
Tell us, in your vast experience, Mr. Obama, how is the best way to “make sure everybody has health care?”
By lying to them? Telling them that if they like their doctor, you can keep him? And if they don’t, they can pick an even better doctor? For free!
Everyone now knows that is a total lie. You are making it up.
What about jobs for everyone, Mr. Obama?
In your tremendous history as a “community organizer” what is the best way to give somebody a job? You never gave a single person a job whose salary didn’t come from the innocent taxpayer. Except, of course, when you were running political campaigns — still using other people’s money.
And now we know you were lying the whole time.
Now if you really want to know how to create an environment where the most people possible earn a “living wage,” Mr. Obama, you should ask the current occupant of the White House. He actually has a lifelong record of hiring people with his own money.
In addition, President Trump also has a stunning record of lowering unemployment and increasing workforce participation to levels that you, Mr. Obama, could only have dreamed of. Furthermore, Mr. Trump also has a stunning record of creating an environment where people saw their incomes go up.
But, I guess, as you famously claimed, all credit in all things goes to your great deity on high, the federal government.
“You didn’t build that,” you might say.
• Charles Hurt is opinion editor of The Washington Times. He can be reached at churt@washingtontimes.com or @charleshurt on Twitter.
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