I have been saying it over and over, and as far as I know, I have been the only one. Until last night. Last night, someone else said what I have been saying. And I must admit he said it better than I did, and certainly said it to more people. The speaker was Barack Obama, talking last night in Pittsburgh. I am not going to get the words exactly as he said it, but basically it was: “Donald Trump boasts of his great economy in the first years of his presidency. He did have a good economy in those years. But the economy that he had was MY ECONOMY!”

Yes, the second Obama term is the basis of the early Trump economy, just as Donald Trump’s governing was the basis of whatever problems the economy had under the early years of Joe Biden. Why, I keep asking, don’t all the Democrats keep saying this?

It reminds me of the other thing the Democrats should be saying, but aren’t. Knowing that Joe Biden’s oft perceived shortcomings (accurate or not) are giving some nominally independent voters a push to vote for Trump, why don’t they push back when the Republicans call the current administration the Harris administration, and not the Biden administration? They hint that a vice president can tell a president what to do, or at least veto a president’s decision that could have been better. Or they hint that Joe Biden, from the day he was inaugurated, has been mentally unable to lead his administration and that he, internally and somewhat secretly, told Kamala to take charge. But the Democrats do not push back on this, either.

Just yesterday, Tim Walz had to take back his very reasonable opinion that the Electoral College should be abolished because it is not “the opinion of the campaign”.

For a minute, I want to get back to Liz Cheney’s book Oath and Honor, which I finished and really appreciate. I wrote a few days ago about her discussion of the events of January 6 and their buildup, and how I felt every Republican voter and independent voter in the country should be given a copy of at least that part of the book to read. The remainder of the book was about the reaction of members of the House and Senate after January 6 (and particularly the dishonesty and hypocrisy of the Republicans, and about the House investigatory committee on which she and Adam Kitzinger were the only Republican members.

After doing its preliminary work, the committee held seven public sessions, as you may remember. One interesting point she made is how the focus of the sessions were established, how each was made to focus on one topic and each differed from the one before. What I did not know and now do, if I read everything (somewhat quickly, I admit) accurately, is that Liz Cheney and her husband Paul Powell, both lawyers, developed the outline of the seven sessions, which the committee adopted.

And, while the first part of the book made Trump and his GOP crew appear dangerous, this second part added to the first and made them appear downright villainous. Because now, in addition to the events as they appeared leading up to and on January 6, we had sworn testimony of many involved on the inside.

An abbreviated description of the seven sessions:

1. How Trump tried to persuade the public that the election had been stolen and that he was still the president.
2. How Trump tried to persuade state officials to “flip official certified electoral votes to Trump”.
3. How Trump created fraudulent elector slates
4. How Trump tried to politicize the Department of Justice to force states to flip votes or certify votes of fake electors.
5. How all of this was done to permit Vice President Pence to count the false Trump electors, rather than the official Biden electors, on January 6.
6. How Trump promoted a massive turnout of his supporters in Washington on January 6 to further apply pressure on Pence.
7. How, when it became clear that Pence was not going to cooperate, Trump instructed his supporters to break into the Capitol, disrupt the proceedings and stop the count, keeping quiet even after the invasion of the Capitol when he was begged to call his rioters off and to tell them to go home.

Obama, in his typically excellent speech in Pittsburgh last night, said that he understood that there were a lot of people in the country who are hurting, and would like to see some change in the direction of the country, in the hope that the change would help them overcome their current problems. But, he said, that he could not understand how anyone can think that Donald Trump is the vehicle that could bring about that type of change.

Clearly, anyone who has the opportunity to, and who takes the time to, read Liz Cheney’s book would agree with him.