President Barack Obama on Friday laughed off Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) recent suggestion that positive economic signs could be connected to the GOP’s sweeping victory in the 2014 midterm election.
“Our Republican leader in the Senate, as he was coming in, after trying to block every single thing that we have done to strengthen the economy, starts looking at jobs numbers, says you know, it is getting better because we just got elected. And people are feeling more optimistic,” he said in a campaign-style speech at the DNC Winter Meeting in Washington.
“Which — okay. I didn’t know that’s how the economy worked, but maybe,” he chuckled, grinning from ear to ear. “We’ll call some economists.”
Last month on the Senate floor, newly minted Majority Leader McConnell said, “The uptick [in economic data] appears to coincide with the biggest political change of the Obama administration’s long tenure in Washington: the expectation of a new Republican Congress.”
Obama added on Friday: “Now that their predictions of doom and gloom and death panels and Armageddon haven’t come true — sky hasn’t fallen, Chicken Little’s quiet — the new plan apparently of congressional Republicans, and this is progress, the new plan is to rebrand themselves as the party of the middle class. Not making this up.”
