Biden: 'We Misread the Economy' - And it's all the Republicans' Fault

Start Thinking Right ^ | July 9, 2009 | Michael Eden

[Michael Eden]

Some distant day, many scientists believe, the earth will be devoid of human life due to some cosmic catastrophe or - ultimately - due to our depleted sun transforming into a red giant. The truly good news about such an otherwise bleak future is that the Obama administration will presumably no longer be able to blame Republicans for the economy that they "inherited."

Biden: We 'Misread the Economy'

July 05, 2009

Big admission from Vice President Joe Biden today.

"The truth is, we and everyone else misread the economy," Biden told me during our exclusive "This Week" interview in Iraq.

Biden acknowledged administration officials were too optimistic earlier this year when they predicted the unemployment rate would peak at 8 percent as part of their effort to sell the stimulus package. The national unemployment rate has ballooned to 9.5 percent in June -- the worst in 26 years.

"The truth is, there was a misreading of just how bad an economy we inherited," said Biden, who is leading the administration's effort to implement it's $787 billion economic stimulus plan.

"Now, that doesn't -- I'm not -- it's now our responsibility. So the second question becomes, did the economic package we put in place, including the Recovery Act, is it the right package given the circumstances we're in? And we believe it is the right package given the circumstances we're in," he told me.

The vice president argued more time is needed for the stimulus to work.

"We misread how bad the economy was, but we are now only about 120 days into the recovery package," he said. "The truth of the matter was, no one anticipated, no one expected that that recovery package would in fact be in a position at this point of having to distribute the bulk of money."

Biden didn't rule out a second government stimulus package, but downplayed calls from Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman this week that a second stimulus will be needed.

I pressed the vice president, who is also leading the administration's middle-class task force, on whether he'd rule out a second stimulus package.

"So, no second stimulus?" I asked.

"No, I didn't say that," Biden said, "I think it's premature to make that judgment. This was set up to spend out over 18 months. There are going to be major programs that are going to take effect in September, $7.5 billion for broadband, new money for high-speed rail, the implementation of the grid -- the new electric grid. And so this is just starting, the pace of the ball is now going to increase."

Let's not tell anyone that liberal Paul Krugman's warning that we need a second stimulus is secret code for, "The first stimulus didn't work worth squat, so let's throw more money down the toilet." And let's for DAMN sure not tell anyone that unemployment benefits are going to be ending for workers starting in September and things will truly begin to increasingly suck after that as the unemployment rate grows like "the other 'green shoot'" up and up and up.

Joe Biden says, "We and everyone else misjudged the economy." No, Joe, it just aint so. Just you and your stupid liberal friends misjudged the economy. Don't drag anyone else into your ignorance. Business professionals back in October predicted that Obama would literally bankrupt the country within three years if he was elected. Republicans (such as Paul Ryan) widely predicted the terribly flawed and terribly partisan pork-laden stimulus would fail - which is why only three out of 239 Republicans voted for it (and you can actually make that TWO out of 239, given that one of the three "Republicans" was RINO traitor-turned Democrat Arlen Specter).

Please don't try to involve conservatives in your party's stupidity, Joe. It aint right to lie.

The fact is, the porkulus is a complete failure that will cost the American people's children's children's children $3.27 TRILLION and produce NOTHING.

And the fact is, when the Obama White House assured the American people that his stimulus would save the day, he assumed responsibility for the economy. It is HIS baby now, and he can't keep racking up trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars in stupid and useless spending that will literally "bankrupt the country" and blame the fact that it isn't working on Republicans.

It's also rather funny that Vice President Biden would say "there was a misreading of just how bad an economy we inherited." Please realize that for the last two years - and most definitely for the last eight or nine months - Barack Obama and Joe Biden have been comparing the present economy to the Great Depression. And now they are claiming they didn't know how bad it was? What's worse than the Great Depression? It is beyond ludicrous that these people can spend all this time demonizing the economy as the worst imaginable, and then argue they didn't know that it was that bad.

Here are the opening two paragraphs from a February 13, 2009 Wall Street Journal piece that proves the lie of Biden's remark:

President Barack Obama has turned fearmongering into an art form. He has repeatedly raised the specter of another Great Depression. First, he did so to win votes in the November election. He has done so again recently to sway congressional votes for his stimulus package.

In his remarks, every gloomy statistic on the economy becomes a harbinger of doom. As he tells it, today's economy is the worst since the Great Depression. Without his Recovery and Reinvestment Act, he says, the economy will fall back into that abyss and may never recover.

How can Biden, Obama, or Democrats claim they didn't realize how bad the economy really was after their previous constant fearmongering of the economy?

And the most famous and oft-used line, of course, is that Democrats keep claiming that they "inherited" the economy.

For the record, the Dow Industrial Average was at 11,986.04 on November 3, 2006 when Republicans were last in control of Congress. The unemployment rate for October of 2006 was at 4.4% when Republicans last ran things. As I write this, the Dow is at 8163.60 (on July 7), and the unemployment rate is at 9.5%, respectively. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have been running the House and the Senate for the last two years, and a fine job of running the country into the ground they've done.

Just why is it that Democrats can have control over both the House and Senate while an economy goes from prosperity to impoverishment, and still bear no responsibility for such a result? But that's the narrative, and both the Democratic Party and the mainstream media stuck to their scripts as though the lines had been written by Shakespeare himself. Do you see the great shining lie that you've been told, and told over and over again?

Since the Democrats have been in charge on both branches of Congress, the housing market has collapsed, the banks have collapsed, Fannie and Freddie have collapsed, the auto industry has collapsed, and things have generally turned to the fecal matter that Pelosi's and Reid's head are full of, generally.

But, hey, let's keep blaming everything on Republicans, anyway. When you have an electorate so completely ignorant that 57.4% of voters weren't even able to identify which party controlled Congress, such demagogic claims work.

The ONLY thing that Democrats actually "inherited" was moron genes, a talent for demagoguery and deceit, and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid (please see "moron genes").

Now, the OTHER thing that Democrats love to claim was that Republicans are to blame for the economic disaster because Republican George Bush was President when it happened. And we are all to conveniently forget the fact that such reasoning should likewise make Democrat Barack Obama - who is president RIGHT NOW - is thereby responsible for the current state of the disaster that he nonetheless keeps blaming on Bush.

On what possible grounds are we to blame Bush? What is it that Bush did or didn't do that created our disaster, and which Democrats who controlled both the House and the Senate are somehow absolved from having done or failed to do? Bush, we have been repeatedly lectured, failed to regulate the housing finance industry. And that lack of regulation caused the financial industry to self-destruct. Because the government is far better able to run things than the private sector, as we all know.

Well, wrong, wrong, and wrong, respectively. But let's stick with the Democrats' chief script item and consider just who truly failed to regulate the housing finance industry when it actually would have done some good, and who was really in bed with the worst players who created the crisis in the first place.

First of all, Bush TRIED to regulate the housing finance industry. And the ONLY thing that kept him from succeeding was DEMOCRATS.

Let's go back to September 11, 2003, to see what the New York Times had to say. The article begins:

The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.

Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.

The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies. It would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios.

And it ends:

Significant details must still be worked out before Congress can approve a bill. Among the groups denouncing the proposal today were the National Association of Home Builders and Congressional Democrats who fear that tighter regulation of the companies could sharply reduce their commitment to financing low-income and affordable housing.

''These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis,'' said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ''The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.''

Representative Melvin L. Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, agreed.

''I don't see much other than a shell game going on here, moving something from one agency to another and in the process weakening the bargaining power of poorer families and their ability to get affordable housing,'' Mr. Watt said.

Go back to the phrase at the beginning of the article: "the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago." That would refer to the Clinton Administration's aggressive push to put even more future poison in the fangs of the terrible Community Reinvestment Act.

Democrats blocked the passage of the Bush attempt to regulate the housing finance industry. They were the ones who killed regulation, not Republicans. They said there wasn't a problem. They said that everything was just peachy dandy.

Democrats essentially say that the American people should blame George Bush for not being able to stop Democrats from being stupid, incompetent, and depraved vermin. But how can anyone stop Democrats from being stupid, incompetent, and depraved vermin? It would be like trying to stop the wind from blowing.

Bush and Republicans tried again to REGULATE the housing finance industry in 2005. John McCain wrote a passionate letter warning of an impending collapse of the housing finance industry and urging passage of the bill (specifically, the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, S. 190). But "without a single Democrat vote, the bill was doomed if brought to the floor for the critical 60-vote cloture." Housing finance reform died a death by Democrat.

As late as JUST BEFORE THE WHOLE HOUSING FINANCE INDUSTRY COMPLETELY COLLAPSED, Democrat Barney Frank is on the record saying:

REP. BARNEY FRANK, D-MASS.: I think this is a case where Fannie and Freddie are fundamentally sound, that they are not in danger of going under. They’re not the best investments these days from the long-term standpoint going back. I think they are in good shape going forward.

You can watch Democrats fiddling with the economy just before it burned here (Youtube).

Even Bill Clinton - hardly a Republican source - blamed Democrats and NOT Republicans for refusing to regulate the housing finance industry:

Bill Clinton on Thursday told ABC’s Chris Cuomo that Democrats for years have been “resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I was President to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.”

So the bottom line is this: Democrats blocked reform and regulation. They denied there was a problem. They continued to deny that there were any problems, and continued to block reform and regulation until right before the whole economy went down the drain.

And then they blamed the Republicans for the mess that they had created, refused to fix, and denied even existed in the first place.

What is utterly beautiful in its moronic perfection is that Barney Frank is now trying to do to the condominium market what he did to the housing market by forcing lenders to make risky loans all over again.

Okay, okay, so it was the Democrats who actually screwed up the universe, but you still have to admit that the Obama Administration inherited the problem. It clearly wasn't in power when the fit hit the shan. Right?

Not quite so fast.

Technically, the Obama Administration is obviously not be to blame, having only began its hopefully very short life on January 20, 2009. But Barack Obama personally? You should probably know what a nasty piece of work your president was before he became your president.

Barack Obama as a Senator took more money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac than anybody except his fellow scumbag and fellow Democrat Chris Dodd (who had direct oversight as Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee). Obama also took more money than disgraced and bankrupted Lehman Brothers than anyone but his fellow sleazeball and fellow Democrat Chris Dodd. Now, maybe you're one of those people who believe that corrupt and soon-to-be-bankrupted organizations give buttloads of money to politicians just because they're feeling generous. But people who actually live in the real world understand that Fannie, Freddie, and Lehman Brothers gave money to the politicians whom they believed would be best for their corporate asses and their corporate assets.

Barack Obama as candidate for president made Penny Pritzker - who was at the very EPICENTER of the subprime loan fiasco - his national finance chair. She paid a "fine" of $460 million dollars to basically buy her way out of prison for her part in the early beginnings of the collapse that would eventually extend to the entire economy. Penny Pritzker was to the stability of the housing finance industry on Wall Street what Freddie Krueger was to the dreams of teen agers on Elm Street; just what kind of Faustian deal do you believe the politician who took more money in less time from the worst players in the crisis than anyone bar none struck to have knife-gloved Penny Krueger open up her Rolodex full of demons?

Barack Obama as a private citizen was one of the ACORN lawyers who sued Citibank in 1994 and forced - FORCED - them to reduce their credit standards and make extremely housing mortgage loans to minorities who would subsequently prove unable to pay them. And the ACORN suit took advantage of the openings created by President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. The result of that lawsuit changed the housing finance industry forever afterward - and basically doomed it as soon as housing prices started to drop.

So as President Barack Obama may have "inherited" the crisis; but as a private citizen, as a Senator, and as a candidate for President, he was at the very center of the mess that created the crisis right up to his giant Dumbo ears.

And as Obama continues to blame his inability to handle the economy on what he "inherited," let us not forget that it was Barack Obama who swore up and down that his Generational Theft Act of 2009 would fix the economy - NOT Republicans and NOT George Bush - and it was his economic plan that completely failed to produce the promised results.

It was Barack Obama who put his credibility behind a plan that his administration promised would hold unemployment down below 8% and it was Barack Obama who has presided over an unemployment rate that is now 9.5% and rising. The Congressional Budget Office predicted that unemployment would only have gone to 9% by 2010 had we done nothing at all. And nothing would have been a heckuva lot cheaper than $3.27 trillion. I, for one, assure you that I could have sent the economy crashing for a lot lower price tag that Barack Obama has charged you.

The unemployment rate in November - when Barack Obama was elected - was a Lilliputian (by comparison to the gigantic mess Obama has since made of the economy) 6.7%. It was 7.2% a few months later when his administration assured the American people that he could keep unemployment under 8% if his stimulus plan was passed. It is now, I should say again, at 9.5% - and it many experts expect it to be 11% by next summer.

Obama's answer is still MORE colossal spending. The first stimulus - advertised as a $787 billion package but actually costing $3.27 trillion according to the Congressional Budget Office - is now said to have been too low. We need more porkulus, they tell us. A lot more. We need to borrow more massive debt and pile up more massive deficits that will crush our economy with staggering interest payments in the very near future and ultimately cause a complete collapse of our way of life. We need to nationalize our health care so it will be more like the $86 trillion-in-the-hole runaway freight train to destruction that Medicare is. And we need cap-and-trade legislation that will cap our productivity and trade our prosperity to ensure that our economy can never hope to be productive again.

Keep blaming Bush. Keep blaming Republicans. Keep blaming "failed conservative policies." Blame ANYONE and ANYTHING but Barack Hussein Obama and the Democratic Party that is now in total control of everything.

Just let me shout in your face that by doing so you will help create an economy that will make the Great Depression look like prosperity when the policies that you so stupidly supported implode into staggering debt and even more staggering hyperinflation. And you and your children will starve shoeless in the cold while food riots and tax rebellions erupt all around you as your once great nation is reduced to banana republic status.

[A.Hun]

“heads we win, tails you lose” approach.

You could very well be correct...that's exactly what happened with FDR (and we are still suffering the fallout).

I believe it was Mark Steyn that pointed out a couple of months ago that it was the party in power in various nations during the depression that retained control, whether they were conservative or liberal, as long as it looked like the nations were "recovering". Obama's policies are now proving to have done nothing but make the situation worse. If jobs don't appear quickly, I think the Dems will be out on their butts in 2012.

I sure hope so, anyway.

I wouldn't worry too much about Cloward-Priven. Their aim, to collapse government by milking available social programs, is probably going to happen without any conspiracy. 20% unemployment will do it nicely.

[Michael Eden]

If Mark Steyn said it, it must be true.

I LOVE listening to that guy on the radio.

Two UCLA economics professors did a study that proved that FDR made the Great Depression last SEVEN YEARS longer than it would have without his policies.

My biggest worry, quite frankly, is that we’ve already drank the economic cyanide, and what happens in 2010/2012 won’t change the fact that we’ve ALREADY committed suicide with Obama’s policies. We are/were at such a fragile state, and the LAST thing we needed was hyperinflation-creating massive debt to kill us a couple years from now.

[Newtoidaho]

Truly an excellent summary of the mess, how is started and how it was enabled.
Saddest part is where you point out that almost 60% of the people in the country just have no clue. I have a brother like that, I’ve been working on him for a couple of years trying to get him to pay attention to what is going on. He just refuses to be aware, prefers to keep himself wilfully blind to the issues that are bankrupting him and his 2 young daughters. It is EXTREMELY frustrating, and I’m sure there are a whole lot more people exactly like him out there.

[cranked]

Yeah, yeah, Biden, you goons “misread the economy” at the same time, you continue to espouse that you moronic goons “inherited it.” Ironic or satire....?

[RWB Patriot]

Maybe some conservatives are like me and want people to learn the hard way. There’s no better lesson than that.

[Michael Eden]

You said of your brother, “He just refuses to be aware.” Refusing to think about something unpleasant is clearly a key way that otherwise intelligent people make themselves stupid.

There’s also the stupidity of good intentions paving the road to hell. Liberals mean well, and so it never seems to matter how disastrous their policies turn out to be.

Then there’s the stupidity of the demagogue. If Republicans don’t want to destroy the nation’s economy to accomplish NOTHING (China, India, Russia aren’t going to pursue global warming agendas, and these countries will make any sacrifice on our part useless EVEN IF global warming were actually REAL), they don’t care about nature. That sort of thing.

One of the big problems is that we are such a dumbed-down and irresponsible culture that these kinds of devices actually tend to work.

[A.Hun]

“My biggest worry, quite frankly, is that we’ve already drank the economic cyanide, and what happens in 2010/2012 won’t change the fact that we’ve ALREADY committed suicide with Obama’s policies.”

I’m convinced we have. Our only hope was to keep Dems from gaining control in 2008 and we failed. I expect chaos.

I wrote this in March, and see little need to revise it.

http://www.rightofatilla.net/index_files/Page532.htm

[dearolddad]

Biden....”yep yep, I’m an idiot and there’s nothing you can do about”. THROW THESE CLOWNS OUT OF OFFICE.

Good ole Joe could/would fu*k up a one car funeral.

[Michael Eden]

I looked through your article. Quite a few good points therein.

I think that people should understand that we’re not at a point of a linear downward slope. That point WILL come, but there will be a lot of little ups and little downs.

Go back to the Great Depression as an example. A couple paragraphs from the Wikipedia article are illustrative:

“The Great Depression was triggered by a sudden, total collapse in the stock market. The stock market turned upward in early 1930, returning to early 1929 levels by April, though still almost 30 percent below the peak of September 1929.[10] Together, government and business actually spent more in the first half of 1930 than in the corresponding period of the previous year. But consumers, many of whom had suffered severe losses in the stock market the previous year, cut back their expenditures by ten percent, and a severe drought ravaged the agricultural heartland of the USA beginning in the summer of 1930.

In early 1930, credit was ample and available at low rates, but people were reluctant to add new debt by borrowing.[citation needed] By May 1930, auto sales had declined to below the levels of 1928. Prices in general began to decline, but wages held steady in 1930, then began to drop in 1931. Conditions were worse in farming areas, where commodity prices plunged, and in mining and logging areas, where unemployment was high and there were few other jobs. The decline in the US economy was the factor that pulled down most other countries at first, then internal weaknesses or strengths in each country made conditions worse or better. Frantic attempts to shore up the economies of individual nations through protectionist policies, such as the 1930 U.S. Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and retaliatory tariffs in other countries, exacerbated the collapse in global trade. By late in 1930, a steady decline set in which reached bottom by March 1933.”

I personally believe we’re in the same sort of dynamic. The stock market may go up, and unemployment may go down, but those will be temporary “gains” that will be consumed by other, more powerful forces acting against our economy (such as massive interest payments and soaring interest rates as the full weight of our debt begins to reveal itself; and such as the massive regulatory and tax burdens Democrats are seeking to impose at a time when they should be doing JUST THE OPPOSITE).

Interestingly, the cap-and-trade legislation most Democrats and Obama WANT to impose carries its own version of Smoot-Hawley. To wit, if countries like China and India don’t “play ball” with liberals’ stupid global warming agenda, they will impose tariffs - which will trigger a trade war, which will trigger a depression.

[rockabyebaby]

LOL, he’d screw up a free lunch!

[A.Hun]

I think that people should understand that we’re not at a point of a linear downward slope. That point WILL come, but there will be a lot of little ups and little downs.

In fact, this latest stock rally underscores your point. Although the market is not a good place for long term money, I assume it has been good for traders.

As for the depression, the stock market graph is quite telling:

We are in somewhat the same situation only worse, and for these reason IMHO:

We have a far larger population that exaggerates all the stresses.

Much of our population is dependant on a public dole that did not even exist in the twenties.

The regulatory burden. It kills creation of small business.

In our favor, we do have technology they did not posess then, but this government is determined to keep us from utilizing it.

As for cap and trade, I saw the very provisions you reference. The entire Waxman-Markley Act is the stupidest legislation I have ever seen. For them to pass something like it in these economics times shows how totally out of touch Democrats have become. The only good thing is that ignorance on that scale can't be justified, no matter what the MSM says. That's why I believe they will be vulnerable in '10 in the House, and '12 across the board. It will be too late, but at least Republicans will be picking up the pieces.

As a small businessman I have been watching the economy closely for 34 years. I have never seen it this bad, this early. I hate even talking about it, but people need to know it is going to get worse...a lot worse. We were in for it even if we had the best legislators in history running the government, instead, look at what we are stuck with!

[Hatteras]

Saving for future reference...

[Michael Eden]

I think we’ll be “riding the downward slide” to hell soon - with “soon” possibly being measured in three or four years.

Let me add two things to your list that explains why our situation today is FAR more precarious than it was prior to 1929:

1) They were on the gold standard back then. There was SOMETHING to provide a sane measurement of valuation. Today that “measurement” essentially is what some quasi-bureaucrats SAY it is.

2) Financial devices such as derivatives. We have over $700 trillion dollars of these things - which have been bundled with safer/more stable securities and which have been leveraged as much as a hundredfold or more - floating around like Titanics.

You say something that - while true in itself - I would “spin” to a different context: “In our favor, we do have technology they did not posess then, but this government is determined to keep us from utilizing it.” On my view, the technology ends up being actively pitted against us. The superior technology on the one hand makes byzantine financial devices (like the aforementioned derivatives) easier to create; and on the other hand it makes it easier to juggle numbers to favor a predetermined conclusion and make it appear that everything is okay.

The “investor class” LOVES all that fancy technology, but as a small business guy, I have no doubt that you have long since recognized that fundamentally business and investment practices are relatively timeless. And unfortunately, I would actually argue that technology has actually caused us to radically depart from simple common sense. Too damn many models that are more based on junk than reality.

We keep being told Obama “inherited” the economy, and nobody bothers to point out that Obama has imposed so many business-murdering policies - with MORE (higher taxes, health care and cap-and-trade) coming - that business are simply afraid to stick their necks out.

[A.Hun]

Let me add two things to your list

The point on the gold standard is taken, but it presented problems all its own (primarily money supply). Today, I believe, money's value is as much a question of liquidity as it is supply.

You are spot on about derivatives. Unlike many here, I supported TARP because I feared the bank meltdown would take the derivative market with it. We still are not out of the woods, even with the progress the banking system has made (all you can really say is that it still exists, though).

I agree on your "spin" on tech to a degree...we indeed have had 70 years to build ever more complex traps. It also is responsible for the loss of mfg jobs. Howeever, it is still a powerful force for good in the modern age. My take considered more the limiting of technology by starving business for energy or environmental concerns.

As for Obama, I still haven't decided if he is just this ignorant of basic economics, or if he is intentionally trying to destroy us. Regardless, trying to continue to blame Bush and the Republicans for it is ridiculous. Its not working too well for him anyway...even the MSM is now allowing people to point out that Porkulus did exactly nothing for small business-THE generator of jobs in the US.

[TwelveOfTwenty]

My view is that conservatives had darn well better have a response to all this “inherited” crap or else.

How's this?

Or this?

[Michael Eden]

Well, the first one not so much, because it’s about Bill Clinton letting bin Laden slip away and metasticize, rather than blaming Democrats for the economic malady.

The second one is a good step toward an argument, but it is just about positive economic signs in late 2006. I actually cite the DOW (nearly 12,000) and the unemployment rate (4.4%) prior to when the Democrats took over. I would say we need to take facts such as are presented in this article and marshal them into a larger argument: blame Democrats for killing the economy — primarily by poisoning the housing finance market.

Both articles are quite good: I put them into a word file for further “ammo.” Thanks for posting them.

[TwelveOfTwenty]

Well, the first one not so much, because it's about Bill Clinton letting bin Laden slip away and metasticize, rather than blaming Democrats for the economic malady.

The issue with letting OBL get away when we could have had him is the impact 911 and the WOT have had on our economy and budget.

But the key work is "inherited". Bush needlessly "inherited" OBL from Clinton (who BTW also didn't catch him in 8 years). The Democrat Congress "inherited" 4.5% unemployment from the GOP. That's what I was getting at.