First lady Michelle Obama, stepping onto the campaign stage to help Democrats in the midterms, is arguing that her husband “truly made” the change and hope he promised after former President George W. Bush gave him the keys and he saw “the mess he’d been handed.”
“When folks ask me whether I still believe everything we said about change and hope back in 2008, I tell them that I believe it more strongly now than ever before, because, look, I’ve seen it with my own eyes,” she said at a Democratic campaign in Washington late Thursday.
“While we still have plenty of work to do, we have truly made so much of that change we were talking about,” said the first lady.
Refusing to let critics get the upper hand, Obama in just a couple of paragraphs presented her case for the president being considered among the nation’s greatest, especially after he followed Bush, “when Barack first took office, and took a look at the mess he’d been handed and wondered what on Earth he had gotten himself into.”
To applause, she continued. “Let me just take you back to how bad things were back then. We were in full-blown crisis mode — do you remember that? Our economy was literally on the brink of collapse. Wall Street banks were folding. Businesses were losing 800,000 jobs a month. Folks on TV were panicking about whether we were headed for another Great Depression -– and that wasn’t just talk, that was a real possibility. This is what Barack walked into on day one as president. I could go on.”
But, she added, her husband fixed the nation’s ills.
“Now, think about how things look today, less than six years later. Our businesses have created 10 million new jobs. The long-term unemployment rate has dropped by more than half over the past four years. We’ve now had the longest period of job growth since World War II. And as folks across the country have gone back to work, overall unemployment is the lowest it’s been in nearly six years,” said the first lady.
And, she added, her husband’s administration has also changed American assumptions and values. “Just think about how different our country looks to children growing up today. Think about how our kids take for granted that a black person or a woman can be president of the United States. They take it for granted that for the first time in history, there are three brilliant women serving on our Supreme Court.”
And it’s not over, she promised, pushing her audience to commit to voting in the midterms. “I know that we can keep making that change we believe in,” she said.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
