Guy Benson

This isn't even The One's most telling admission from the last few days, but we're nevertheless happy to pass along this rare moment of presidential candor:

The unemployment rate is languishing at 8.2 percent, and is much worse in the black and Hispanic communities.  If Obama had maintained the workforce participation rate he'd inherited, that overall number would be hovering around 11 percent.  The "real" unemployment rate is 14.9 percentOf course he'd hammer the hell out of his opponent if the roles were reversed -- especially if there were a mammoth, wasteful, debt-increasing, ineffective, outsourcing "stimulus" program to target.  Instead, he's stuck blathering about how we're headed "in the right direction," even as job growth is slowing and GDP growth stagnates.  All that being said, the more interesting recent quote from the president was this stump speech slip-up while discussing the Obamacare mandate tax.  Remember, he and his party have been insisting that the mandate is not, not, not a tax:


“By the way, if you’ve got health insurance, you’re not getting hit by a tax,” President Obama said. “The only thing that’s happening to you is that you now have more security because insurance companies can’t drop you when you get sick.”

Ah ha.  But if you don't have health insurance -- and you won't or can't comply with the government's new mandate that you purchase that expensive, heavily-regulated product -- you are "getting hit by a tax."  I could mount an extensive argument against this onerous governmental intrusion and tax on the middle class and the uninsured, but I'll let someone else do that for me.  Three discrete clips:


To recap: Candidate Obama was adamantly against the mandate tax in 2008 before he adopted it as his own a year later.  (In fact, this was the key policy difference he highlighted between himself and Hillary Clinton during their bruising primary). Then, during his dishonest campaign pushing an unpopular, unaffordable health care law, Obama frequently denied that the mandate was a tax at all.  After the bill was passed, his administration's lawyers began to argue in court that it was, indeed, a tax after all.  They later dropped that argument, only to see it resurrected by the Supreme Court, which ruled that Obamacare's mandate is only Constitutional as a tax.  Even as Democrats embraced SCOTUS' ruling, they still spun like mad that the mandate tax wasn't a tax.  And now Obama is back to calling it a tax.  Got all that?  I think I counted six flip-flops in there.  The president can tie himself in pretzels on this, but the outcome remains the same: His $2 Trillion healthcare law relies on a giant, middle class tax.  Period.  This utterly violates another infamous "firm pledge" from the 2008 campaign:

The president's promises are worthless.  Just wait until he's liberated to be more "flexible" in a potential second term, when he can govern secure in the knowledge that he will never be held accountable by voters again.

Guy Benson


Author Photo credit: Jensen Sutta Photography