The Howard speech is part of Obama's victory lap. But it's not clear what the victory amounts to. Obama has pushed the country far to the left and broken both parties quite badly. He also broke the economy, the military and just about everything else. And then we get this mangled bit of self-congratulation which actually has a whole other meaning if you know any history.
"I graduated in 1983. New York City, America’s largest city, where I lived at the time, had endured a decade marked by crime and deterioration and near bankruptcy. And many cities were in similar shape. Our nation had gone through years of economic stagnation, the stranglehold of foreign oil, a recession where unemployment nearly scraped 11 percent. The auto industry was getting its clock cleaned by foreign competition."
New York City in 1983 was barely being held above water by Ed Koch. It was a disaster area that would get horrifyingly bad under his successor David Dinkins. Only when Giuliani came into office, did the city begin making massive improvements to the point of being largely unrecognizable today on a street level basis. That would take another decade. Today under Bill de Blasio, it's plummeting horrifyingly back to the era of Democratic blight.
When Obama graduated, the country was still early in Reagan's first term. Reagan did for America what Giuliani had done for New York City. Obama has done a great job of reversing Reagan's achievements.
America is now back to economic stagnation. The fracking revolution that broke the stranglehold of foreign oil is being strangled by Obama's allies. Real unemployment is not that much lower than 11 percent, depending on how you calculate it. And what's left of our auto industry is mostly foreign owned or a government subsidized mess. And Tesla, despite all the fawning Musk-Distortion-Field headlines is very much the latter.
"So America is better. And the world is better, too. A wall came down in Berlin. An Iron Curtain was torn asunder."
The name you're looking for... Reagan. If Obama were around then, the USSR would still exist and he would have kept it going, just like he kept Cuba and Iran going.
"America is better. The world is better. And stay with me now -- race relations are better since I graduated. That’s the truth. No, my election did not create a post-racial society. I don’t know who was propagating that notion. That was not mine. But the election itself -- and the subsequent one"
Nope. Poll after poll shows a majority feel race relations are terrible. Who was pushing that idea? Maybe it was this guy?
"There is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America—there's the United States of America.”
— Barack Obama, 2004 Democratic National Convention Keynote Address
Then he got elected and decided to fight every battle by accusing his opponents of racism, or having his proxies do it for him, while setting off race riots.