"Elizabeth Warren says Obama doesn't understand 'lived experience of most Americans.'"

[frazzled]

204. Obama never talked about GDP

I listened to so many of his speeches on the economy, and that was never something he stressed (or even mentioned). Why would he? Very few people even knows what it means. And it was never that robust during his tenure (though a lot better than people economists thought it should be after the recession.) Is it something the government is required to report on? Sure. Did he talk about it? No.

He did talk about unemployment, because it is indeed a pretty big deal when it goes down from 10% to under 5%, no matter what means you are using to measure it: it was significantly better than it was when he took office. Did he talk about those who were still struggling despite improvements in the overall economy? You bet he did. I looked it up, and here are some excerpts from his 2016 speech on the economy:

And we can see the results not just here in Elkhart, but across the nation. By almost every economic measure, America is better off than when I came here at the beginning of my presidency. That’s the truth. That’s true. (Applause.) It’s true. (Applause.) Over the past six years, our businesses have created more than 14 million new jobs -- that’s the longest stretch of consecutive private sector job growth in our history. We’ve seen the first sustained manufacturing growth since the 1990s. We cut unemployment in half, years before a lot of economists thought we would. We’ve cut the oil that we buy from foreign countries by more than half, doubled the clean energy that we produce. For the first time ever, more than 90 percent of the country has health insurance. (Applause.)

In fact, a poll that was out just last week says that two out of three Americans think their own family’s financial situation is in pretty good shape. But we know a lot of people are still feeling stressed about their economic future. . . .

But if you watch the talking heads on TV, they all say, the reason that folks are angry is because nobody has paid enough attention to the plight of working Americans in communities like these. That's what they say.

Now, look, I’m the first to admit my presidency hasn’t fixed everything. We’ve had setbacks. We've had false starts. We've, frankly, been stuck with a Congress recently that's opposed pretty much everything that we’ve tried to do. But I also know that I've spent every single day of my presidency focused on what I can do to grow the middle class and increase jobs, and boost wages, and make sure every kid in America gets the same kind of opportunities Michelle and I did. (Applause.) I know that. I know that communities like Elkhart haven’t been forgotten in my White House. And the results prove that our focus has paid off. Elkhart proves it.

Now, where we haven’t finished the job, where folks have good reason to feel anxious, is addressing some of the longer-term trends in the economy -- that started long before I was elected -- that make working families feel less secure. These are trends that have been happening for decades now and that we've got to do more to reverse. Let me be clear about what those are.

Despite the drop in unemployment, wages are still growing too slowly, and that makes it harder to pay for college or save for retirement. (Applause.) Inequality is still too high. The gap between rich and poor is bigger now than it's been just about any time since the 1920s. The rise of global competition and automation of more and more jobs; the race of technology -- all these trends have left many workers behind, and they've let a few at the top collect extraordinary wealth and influence like never before. And that kind of changes our politics. So all these trends make it easy for people to feel that somehow the system is rigged and that the American Dream is increasingly hard to reach for ordinary folks. And there are plenty of politicians that are preying on that frustration for headlines and for votes.

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/06/01/remarks-president-economy

Read the rest of it, because it's good (goes on to address various myths that people believe). But here's the deal. The biggest myth of all, and the one that Elizabeth Warren is promulgating here to prey on the gullible, is that Obama only threw around fancy numbers like the GDP. That he and his elitist, establishment cohorts (like Hillary Clinton) didn't pay any attention to the Americans "left behind." Untrue. Just patently false. Besides that, it's easy to criticize, not so easy to change these big, long-term changes in the economy, such as technology and automation.

As a last remark, let me say that she is joining all those who are speaking essentially to a very specific segment of the population: white working class males. But here's the deal: welcome, finally, to the world of those "left behind in the economy," Liz. Because for decades and decades and decades (the whole entire history of America, actually) everybody besides white males were "left behind in the economy": women, minorities, everyone besides white males. Many of them have made gains under the Clinton and Obama administrations. But whoop dee doo, when the white males find themselves in the left-behind category that millions of other Americans have suffered for eternity, it's suddenly a big deal. And simple solutions are offered, most of which are entirely misdirected or unrealistic. We have been in a slow shift of our economy since the 80s, and it's a different economy. And yes, people are struggling everyday. And some of the fixes are little but significant, some are big and hard. But we're not going back, and criticisms of Democrats only help the Republicans, who are only making things far worse.

So, no.