President Obama predicted that Democrats would be able to hold majority control of the Senate in the critical midterm elections this November and touted his record of fixing the economy as better than any other world leader’s.
“I can put my record against any other leader around the world in terms of digging ourselves out of a terrible, almost unprecedented financial crisis,” Obama told Steve Kroft of CBS’ “60 Minutes” in part of an interview that aired Sunday night.
Just moments later, Kroft flatly asked if he thought Democrats would be able to keep control of the Senate.
“Yes, I do,” the president stated.
In recent months, Obama’s poll numbers have sunk to some of the lowest in his six-year tenure. A RealClearPolitics.com average of recent polls shows that just 41 percent of the public approves of the job he is doing while 54 percent disapprove.
Pressed on whether his poll numbers would translate in Democratic losses at the polls, he borrowed a revamped phrase from former President Reagan’s re-election campaign to drive his point home.
“Ronald Reagan used to ask the question, ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’” he said. “In this case, are you better off than you were in six? And the answer is, the country is definitely better off than we were when I came into office.”
He agreed with Kroft that many people don’t feel better of because “incomes and wages are not going up.”
“There are solutions for that,” Obama said. “If we raise the minimum wage, if we make sure women are getting paid same as men for doing the same work, if we are rebuilding our infrastructure, if we are doing more to invest in job training so people are able to get those jobs that are out there.”
Manufacturing in the country, he said, is rebounding and not just in the auto industry.
“You are starting to see reinvestment here in the United States,” he said. “For the first time in a long time, the place to invest isn’t China, it’s the United States.”
Obama also said his policies have helped produce the “longest run of uninterrupted private-sector growth” in the country’s history.
Unemployment, he said, went from 10 percent, when he came into office, to 6.1 percent.
“We have seen deficits cut by more than half, corporate balance sheets are probably the best they’ve been for the last several decades,” he said. “We are producing more energy than we have than every before — we are producing more clean energy than we ever have before.”
