President Barack Obama speaks at the National Urban League convention in New Orleans on July 25, 2012.
Obama never said this. The projection was made in a report, written in January 2009, just before Obama took office, by White House economists Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein. The paper attempted to predict the effect of a stimulus package that had yet to be written, before the full severity of the economic downturn was clear. Its forecast turned out to be wrong; unemployment languished above 8% for nearly all the President’s term. But it was a projection someone else made, not a promise from Obama.