Barack Obama has made his way to The Daily Show five times to pay homage to Comedy Central funny-man Jon Stewart, but anyone watching could tell that last night’s appearance had a completely different feel. Obama was quick to point the interview in the direction of serious topics, and he wasted no time in making his (largely untrue and factually incorrect) case for why younger voters (who watch The Daily Show in droves) should repeat their support of him.
Obama began the interview by admitting his first debate performance was an “off night” for him (understatement of the year), but continued to hammer home the idea that although Mitt Romney “makes a good presentation,” his plan is ultimately to put an economy in place that’s “good for a few folks at the top, but wasn’t working for ordinary Americans.” I wonder if a flat unemployment/underemployment rate of 14.7 percent works for those “ordinary Americans” and young voters he desperately wishes to woo?
President Obama continued by announcing a laundry list of phony economic achievements that included “thirty-one months of consecutive job growth” (that doesn’t keep up with expansion of the economy), “5.2 million jobs created” (which doesn’t include all of the jobs lost under Obama), and the return of “manufacturing jobs” (even though they really aren’t coming back).
Based on the President’s economic analysis, we should be in a full-blown recovery. Instead, he gave himself a giant pat on the back for taking him nearly four years to bring unemployment rat) down to where it was when he took office.
A second laundry list then followed the first that intended to show that Barack Obama has kept his campaign promises from 2008… a point easily disputed.
But Obama admitted he wasn’t completely satisfied with his performance in office. When Stewart asked Obama if there was anything he wished could be different, Obama took the opportunity to blame Republicans by saying, “We could be growing even faster than we have if Governor Romney’s allies in Congress would move on some of the things that we have recommended.” Let’s hope someone reminds the President that for his first two years in office he had a Democratic majority in the House and a super-majority in the Senate.
All in all, the President lied and misled more times in the first six minutes of his interview with Stewart than he normally does in 10 minutes with anyone else – finally an achievement that would pass a fact check!
But the most noteworthy exchange came later in the interview, on the topic of Libya. Stewart referenced the President’s two week-long failure to actually refer to the attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya that killed four Americans as a terrorist attack, then asked “Is part of the investigation helping the communication between these divisions? Not just what happened in Benghazi, but what happened within? Because I would say, even you would admit, it was not the optimal response, at least to the American people, as far as us all being on the same page.”
Obama responded, “Here’s what I’ll say. If four Americans get killed, it’s not optimal. We’re going to fix it.” His careless comments soon set off a firestorm of criticism across the web that will surely dominate the news cycle just days before Romney and Obama square off again in their third and final debate, this debate focusing on foreign policy.
Obama agreed to The Daily Show interview largely in the hopes that it could sway younger voters to get to the polls, but his reference to four dead Americans as “not optimal” will likely hurt him more than the interview can help him. Let’s all hope the next time Obama is a guest on The Daily Show, it will be as a former president.
If you want to read more about Obama’s less-than-optimal Libyan comments, read Francesca Chambers’ excellent piece here on Red Alert Politics.
