During a trip to Illinois earlier this week, President Barack Obama admitted that political divides have gotten worse under his leadership.
CNS News reports (emphasis added):
[I]t’s been noted often by pundits that the tone of our politics hasn’t gotten better since I was inaugurated, in fact it’s gotten worse; that there’s still this yawning gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics. Which is why, in my final State of the Union address, and in the one before that, I had to acknowledge that one of my few regrets is my inability to reduce the polarization and meanness in our politics. I was able to be part of that here (in the Illinois Senate) and yet couldn’t translate it the way I wanted to into our politics in Washington.
In his State of the Union address in January, President Barack Obama chided Republicans for using politically divisive rhetoric.
Ironically, or perhaps not so ironically, the president’s own words towards politicians of a different stripe haven’t always been so civil in the past.
Here’s 14 times Obama’s words were not so civil.
Most notable of the bunch is when Obama said that the rhetoric among Republicans regarding Muslims and refugees was a recruitment tool for the Islamic State.
“I cannot think of a more potent recruitment toll for ISIL than some of the rhetoric that’s been coming out of here during the course of this debate,” he said in November.
