Democrats have a problem.
With so many geriatric politicians shuffling around Washington, D.C., verbal slipups sometimes happen that reveal things they shouldn’t.
Usually, it’s something like President Joe Biden’s admission that his handlers don’t want him taking questions from the press or when the 78-year-old is spinning one of his tall tales that’s easily debunked.
But now House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, 81, accidentally attributed the jewel of the Biden agenda to former President Barack Obama that left us wondering whether it was a sober revelation or just another “senior moment” from an elderly politician?
“Keep government open — we intend, we have to do those imminently, more imminently even to address the full Obama agenda of building back better,” Pelosi said to reporters during a House Democratic Leaders news conference Tuesday.
To be fair, Pelosi had just been comparing the fight with Republicans over raising the debt ceiling during the Obama administration to the one about to happen now under Biden.
Moreover, Pelosi is an elderly woman who could easily find herself muddling facts as her brain just can’t keep up and orient her to the proper date.
But it’s also true that Biden’s Build Back Better agenda is a tax-and-spend bonanza like his former boss’, complete with language about “making the tax code fairer and making the wealthiest and large corporations pay their fair share.”
Then there’s the way Obama famously admitted he would increase capital gains taxes for the sake of fairness regardless of any economic benefit to doing so, and Biden’s historic tax hike on the wealthy echoes the same class warfare game.
There are the overlapping promises to reduce health care premiums and costs in Biden’s agenda that sound similar to the promises made about Obamacare, though predictably it remains a problem to be solved even after Obama “fixed” it (funny how that works).
On a broader scale, the two are twinning when it comes to their handling of race relations, though Biden has taken the mask of civility off to stoke the flames of the dumpster fire that the issue has turned into.
Like Obama, the current president never misses the chance to divide along racial lines and attribute whatever he can to racism, though it doesn’t pack the same punch coming from an old white guy.
But they even handle racially charged fake news stories the same. When the easily debunked narrative about Border Patrol agents whipping migrants made the rounds, Biden was out in front of the facts and threatened that “those people will pay.”
That self-righteous and ill-informed stance echoed the way Obama handled a situation during his presidency where police responded to a neighbor’s call of a possible burglary only to find a black professor trying to break into his own property.
Though the police were simply trying to ascertain whether the man did indeed own the home, accusations of racial profiling were flying and Obama ran with the narrative, declaring those police officers involved “acted stupidly” without regard to the facts of the case.
It seems that having Biden in office is akin to a third term for Obama, though he’s the older and clunkier model in many ways.
Pelosi probably didn’t have all of this in mind when she said they were working toward Obama’s agenda and likely used the wrong name because she’s old and has been in politics forever — but she was onto something.
It seems that stopped clocks and memory-challenged octogenarians occasionally get things right, even if it’s only by accident.