A Contrast of Presidents: Bill Clinton v. Barack Obama

The recently concluded Democratic Party convention featured three Presidents as speakers – two former, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and one current, Barack Obama.

Carter’s non-prime time talk was nondescript.  But Clinton and Obama both gave well-crafted and well received speeches.  Give the devils their due.  But don’t credit either with an accurate portrayal of reality.

Clinton’s falsehoods were obvious no matter how palatably delivered.

***President Obama, his predecessor asserted, offered the country a debt reduction plan that would cut spending significantly more than taxes would be raised.  Not True.

 

***The Administration is responsible for the fact that health care costs have risen only four percent in each of the past two years.  Not True.

***The President has sponsored a jobs creation that, absent GOP opposition, would have meant one million new jobs.  Not True.

 

            [source:  WashingtonPost.com/factchecker]

 

President Obama’s time at the podium was more oriented toward expressions of hope and promises than in factual claims (it worked in 08, do it again).  But his speech was hardly a model for truth-telling. 

 

“Around the world we’ve strengthened old alliances and forged new coalitions to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.”  (Has anyone told the Iranians?)

 

The GOP ticket wants to “take us back to an era of blustering and blundering that cost America so dearly.”  (Is the President referring to the era of Ronald Reagan who stared down the Soviets?)

 

Romney will “gut” education.  (By reining in teachers’ unions and promoting school choice?)

 

Or how about this beauty?  Republicans believe that “if a company releases toxic pollutants into the air our children breathe, that’s the price of progress.”  (Of course, Mitt Romney is a throwback to the Robber Barons of the 19^th century, isn’t he?)

 

One senses that Barack Obama really believes this nonsense.  He is plainly arrogant and self-righteous.  The President, no doubt, views himself as an upstanding, moral individual who is merely trying to do the best for America.  And he knows what that is.  Those who disagree (dastardly Republicans), therefore, must not have the country’s best interest at heart.  For, after all, he wouldn’t say negative things about them if they weren’t true. 

It’s as if Barack Obama lives in a world constructed not as it is, but as he’d like it to be.

Bill Clinton is of a different sort.  His long political – and personal – history makes clear that his association with truth is an occasional thing.  The charming knave is nothing if not calculating, so what he says, whether true or false, is done for effect.  But, to his credit, unlike the incumbent president, he seems to know the difference.