Does Obama realize he was president in 2009?

Byron York seriously wonders:

What is it with Barack Obama and 27 months? Listen to the president and his aides talk, and you'll soon hear claims that the administration has accomplished great things in the last 27 months.

"The private sector creat[ed] nearly 4.3 million new jobs in the last 27 months," the president said at a fundraiser in Baltimore on Tuesday.

"We have created 500,000 manufacturing jobs over the last 27 months," top Obama economic adviser Gene Sperling said the same day on CNN.

"We've had 4.3 million private-sector jobs created over the last 27 months," Obama campaign spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said in a conference call with reporters Monday.

There are plenty of other examples. Beyond that, whenever Mitt Romney or some other Republican attacks the president's record, the Obama campaign sends out reams of rebuttal material pointing to economic progress -- all in the last 27 months.

The problem, of course, is that Barack Obama has been president for 40 months. So why do he and his supporters speak as if he has only been in the White House for the last 27 -- that is, since March 2010? It's as if the first third of Obama's presidency just doesn't count.

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Obama also now blames a gridlocked partisan Congress for forcing his hand on immigration. The problem is, the president couldn't pass his immigration policy even when he had the support of Democratic majorities in both the House of Representatives and Senate for the first two years he was in office.