The economic stagnancy of the Obama years is to blame for plummeting life expectancy rates among white, working-class Americans, according to former president Bill Clinton, who privately told Democratic donors that lower-income whites “don’t have anything to look forward to when they get up in the morning.”
Clinton made the remarks while speaking to at a November 2015 closed-door fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in Canton, Ohio.
Echoing a theme of Republican nominee Donald Trump’s campaign, the former president expressed his concern that white, working-class Americans have been left behind over the last eight years.
Clinton expressed his frustration with the most recent (at that time) Democratic debate, which he said lacked a single mention of the fact that “84 percent of the American people, after inflation, had not had a raise of 1 cent since the financial crash.”
“We have incredible debates all over America that shouldn’t exist between people in different racial groups because they don’t trust law enforcement anymore,” he continued. “And in the middle of all this we learned, breathtakingly, that middle-aged, non-college-educated white Americans’ life expectancy is going down and is now lower than Hispanics, even though they make less money.”
“And the gap between African Americans and whites is closing, but unfortunately not because the death rate among African Americans is dropping but because the death rate among white Americans is rising.” Clinton continued.
“Why? Because they don’t have anything to look forward to when they get up in the morning. Because their lives are sort of stuck in neutral. Because their lives are sort of stuck in neutral.” (RELATED: Bill Clinton Told Donors The Border Won’t Be Secure ‘For A Very Long Time’)
20151119 WJC Remarks at HFA Fundraiser in Canton, OH by Peter Hasson on Scribd
The transcript from the fundraiser was — along with thousands of emails — hacked from campaign chair John Podesta’s email account and later published by anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks.
