Donald Trump is frequently faulted, and rightly so, for attempting to take credit for things he had nothing to do with. With Trump, though, you get the feeling it’s the habit of the real-estate mogul and showbiz kingpin talking. He doesn’t actually think (does he?) that the stock market goes up because of anything he did—it’s part of his shtick.
With Barack Obama, one feels there’s no shtick. He means it. At a recent speech at Rice University in Houston, the former president took credit for the current uptick in U.S. oil production. “You wouldn’t always know it, but it went up every year I was president,” he said to applause. “That whole—suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest [in] gas—that was me, people.” He went on to add, in that charmingly humble way of his, “It’s a little like sometimes you go to Wall Street, and folks will be grumbling about anti-business, and I say, ‘Have you checked where your stocks were when I came into office and where they are now? What are you complaining about?’ Just say thank you, please.”
We have no interest in defending the honor of oil companies or Wall Street fund managers, but Obama’s delusional bragging about oil production reminds us what we disliked most about him: his conviction that the good things in this life are mainly the product of smart politicians like himself and their noble-hearted public-sector underlings. The private sector, in his mind, mainly just takes advantage of the clever things government produced. If you remember his 2012 reelection campaign, the snappy version of this argument was “You didn’t build that.”
In the case of oil production, though, Obama’s claim is spectacularly untrue. According to the Congressional Research Service, oil and gas production on federal lands—that’s 28 percent of the area of the country—actually dropped while Obama was president. Production exploded everywhere that wasn’t restricted by federal regulators. There were offshore drilling moratoriums, onerous and pointless rules regulating fracking, the administration’s stubborn refusal to permit construction of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, and too many egregious EPA crackdowns to name. Oil production soared, eventually—but despite Obama, not because of him.
Hey, President Obama. A message from the private sector: You’re welcome.
