For the final time, President Obama stood in front of a packed Congressional chamber Tuesday night to deliver his last State of the Union address.
The President began, "Tonight marks the eighth year that I've come here to report on the state of the union. And for this final one, I'm going to try to make it a little shorter."
But from the beginning of his address, the president's proclamations were a bit misleading. Tuesday night was only Obama's 7th State of the Union speech, not his eighth. The President's 2009 address was technically not a State of the Union. And the latest speech clocked in at 58:44, more than a minute shorter than 2013's address and several minutes below Obama's average of 1:02:45.
President Obama continued his speech, focusing on healthcare, which is a main part of his presidential legacy by noting, "More than 9 million Americans have signed up for private health insurance or Medicaid coverage."
This is misleading. Although 9 million is the number released by the Obama administration, not all those millions of people gained coverage for the first time because of Obamacare. That number is probably closer to three million, according to a study conducted last month by Forbes. Still, the number of healthcare sign-ups has grown exponentially from the 106,000 who signed up in the first month of healthcare enrollment.
The president then turned to his economic record, explaining, "We're in the middle of the longest streak of private-sector job creation in history. More than 14 million new jobs, the strongest two years of job growth since the '90s, an unemployment rate cut in half."
This is misleading. While it's true the U.S. has added more than 14 million new jobs and cut unemployment numbers in half, the average number of jobs created in the 70-month period is lower than it was under either former Presidents Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan. And, when you exclude a single month of decline, Clinton and Reagan both had longer streaks of 85 and 71 months, respectively.
After the President's address, the Republican Party got a chance to respond. South Carolina's governor Nikki Haley lead the charge, telling Americans, "Many of your frustrations are my frustrations. A frustration with a government that has grown day after day, year after year, yet doesn't serve us any better."
This is false. The federal government has not grown under the Obama administration. One way to measure the size of the government is to look at the number of government workers. And federal employment has drastically dropped during the Obama administration. At one point in 2014, federal employment reached its lowest level since 1966. There's been a slight uptick since then, but Washington jobs are at their lowest levels since World War II.
Because of that, the President finished off his speech, confident as ever, exclaiming, "That's why I stand here as confident as I have ever been, that the state of our union is strong."