Feeling nostalgic for Obama?

In PJ Media, Matt Margolis gives us ten reasons to be nostalgic for Obama.

10. Debt
Ahh, remember when massive, unsustainable debt was cool because Obama did it? When he took office in 2009 his answer to the recession was to spend, spend, spend… and spend he did. For the next three years America had deficits over $1 trillion with very little to show for it. The recession officially ended in June 2009, but the actual recovery was the slowest since the Great Depression. Wages remained low and flat. Who wouldn’t miss that?

9. Poverty
Obviously the Obama years broke quite a few records. The next record Obama achieved was breaking a 50-year record on poverty. During the Obama years, we had three consecutive years of the poverty level standing at 15 percent, and Obama left office with more people on food stamps than there were when he took office. Food stamp usage reached a record 47 million people while Obama was in office.

8. Gross Domestic Product
Obama is the only president in U.S. history to have never had a single year of 3.0 percent or greater annual GDP growth.

7. Student Loan Debt
Obama was elected twice with the help of young people, and he rewarded them for their support with massive student loan debt. Five years into his presidency student loan debt skyrocketed 463 percent. Much, much faster than it had under Bush–about 500 percent faster. Obama ingeniously had the federal government takeover student loans and the results were simply astounding. Under Obama, college students found themselves graduating with more debt in a job market that lacked jobs.

6. Health Care
Okay, even if you liked your health plan or your doctor you couldn’t keep them, but at least health care got more expensive. Thanks to Obamacare we saw insurance premiums skyrocket, deductibles go through the roof, as coverage got worse. If you didn’t want to pay for insurance, no problem! You just had to pay a fine for not wanting this amazing new health insurance!

5. Gas Prices
Donald Trump just can’t match Obama’s record on gas prices… The national average gas price has yet to reach $3/gallon under Trump, but under Obama, we had gas prices between $3.50 and $4 per gallon for three years straight!

4. Diplomacy
Diplomacy under Obama was in a league of its own. Determined to improve relations with Russia, the Obama administration approved the sale of 20 percent of America’s Uranium to Russia. What could possibly go wrong there, right? Obama was determined to give Russia more of what they wanted regarding many other controversial issues like missile defense, but, as Obama told Dmitry Medvedev in 2012, he needed to wait until after he was reelected to have more flexibility to do so. So, we’ll give him a pass on that. However, when Russia was attempting cyber attacks on America’s elections in 2016, rather than do what they could to stop it, America’s cybersecurity teams were told to stand down.

3. Free Press
We’re all aware of Trump’s antipathy for fake news, but Barack Obama’s treatment of the media is something we can truly be proud of. When the Obama administration didn’t like the media covering a story they did their best to keep the media silent. For example, after Benghazi, they literally threated Fox News in the hopes of bullying them into not covering it. It didn’t work, so they actually proposed having FCC agents placed in newsrooms to monitor whether news being reported was biased. When Obama wasn’t trying to control the media, he was trying to keep secrets from them. Margaret Sullivan, public editor of the New York Times, once spoke of “unprecedented secrecy and unprecedented attacks on a free press” by the Obama administration. Remember when Obama spied on the Associated Press by secretly obtaining phone records? Or when they spied on Fox News reporter James Rosen, even tracked his movements and read his emails, and labeled him a “co-conspirator” in violation of the Espionage Act? Who doesn’t miss the days when we had a president who cared about the free press?

2. Scandals
By my count, there were at least 30 significant Obama administration scandals. That has to be a record, doesn’t it? I mean, Nixon had Watergate, Clinton had Whitewater, Monica Lewinsky, and a slew of other alleged affairs… but thirty scandals under Obama eclipses those. From trying to sell his Senate seat to using government agencies to target his political enemies to even spying on the opponent of his heir apparent to the White House, Obama turned corruption into an art form. Perhaps this should have been expected, given his Chicago roots, but really, the magnitude of his corruption was certainly underestimated by most of us.

1. Mass Surveillance
…After Obama left office we found out his NSA was conducting illegal searches on Americans for years in defiance of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The ACLU called these searches some of the most serious Fourth Amendment abuses ever documented. The most serious ever! Congratulations, Obama!

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