Former President Barack Obama reflects on the political and economic conditions in the US that shaped his 2008 campaign message and persisted during his administration.
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Obama: Republican filibuster obstruction in 2009 was unprecedented in US history
“At the time, there was no precedent for the kind of obstruction that we had seen from the Republican Party. There was no precedent for the use of the filibuster to literally block everything.”
Opinion
Obama: Single-payer healthcare would have been economically disruptive and politically impossible
“Not only politically would it be impossible to start from scratch, but economically be wildly disruptive. A lot of people work for insurance companies and a lot of people work for hospitals under current arrangements and doctors get paid in certain ways and so…”
Opinion
Obama: Federal IT procurement is massively inefficient despite high-caliber talent
“The truth is, certainly at the highest levels of the federal government, people are just as smart and work just as hard, if not harder, than anybody in the private sector. But where there is massive inefficiency is technology and IT procurement. It's just mise…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Obama: Administration's 2008 crisis decisions averted depression and drove record job streak
“The decisions we made at the time did not solve some of the broader underlying trends that I had actually campaigned on, like income and wealth inequality, but it did avert a great depression and stabilize the situation that would allow for painfully slow, but…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Obama: Administration wanted a stimulus package twice as large as $800B Recovery Act
“As a consequence, we could not get enough votes to do more in the initial Recovery Act, as we called it, than eight hundred billion dollars. And I think Subsequently, people have said, ah, you know, you should have done twice as much. Well, yeah, we wanted to …”
Assertion Contradicted
Obama: Federal procurement rules forced waterfall development instead of iterative scaling
“Because of the procurement rules, the way we bought software was this massive stack of specs and working with these huge contractors as opposed to an iterative process of buying software and problem solving and starting small and scaling up.”