Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have spent years collecting praise, honorary degrees, and speaking fees the size of small country GDPs.
But somebody finally asked the question out loud that millions of Americans have been sitting with for a long time.
And it came from someone the Left can’t easily dismiss.
Stephen A. Smith, the ESPN host and executive producer of First Take, went on his podcast Straight Shooter recently and said what a lot of people have been thinking but few with his platform have been willing to put into words. Smith questioned the fortunes of former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama while arguing that politicians should prosper financially only when the American people are also doing well.
Smith told his audience, “I don’t give a damn what money politicians slide into their own pockets from time to time. If the American people are prospering, get yours.”
Fair enough. But that’s where the generosity ends.
“I’ll confess something to ya’ll,” Smith continued. “Clinton was a lawyer in Arkansas. Grew up poor, relatively broke. How the hell him and the Clinton Foundation is worth hundreds of millions of dollars beat me.”
That’s not a partisan attack. That’s arithmetic.
According to an investigation conducted by Forbes, both Bill and Hillary Clinton have netted approximately $240 million since leaving office in 2021. Bill Clinton is reportedly responsible for the majority of the couple’s earnings, raking in $189 million by authoring books and $106 million in paid speeches.
Books and speeches. From a man who left the Arkansas governor’s mansion. You do the math.
Smith also pointed to former President Barack Obama’s similar high net worth. “Barack Obama was a community organizer who became the president of the United States and, last time I checked, that salary ain’t over $450,000, if I remember correctly,” Smith said.
“I got to double check that,” he added. “How the hell you depart from office worth over $200 million?”
A Forbes investigation revealed Obama gained a net worth of about $20 million throughout his 12 years working as both a senator and serving as president, raising his net worth to around $70 million in 2024. That’s a remarkable trajectory for a man whose most famous pre-Senate credential was organizing communities on the South Side of Chicago.
And Smith isn’t finished.
Smith told his audience that while he does not mind if politicians earn high profits when the American people are also doing well financially, he does not believe that is currently the situation. “I’m cool with it if the American people are prospering, but last time I checked, that’s not the case,” Smith said.
That’s the part that stings. The wealth accumulation might be explainable in isolation. What’s harder to explain is the timing. Both Clinton and Obama presided over eras their own party celebrated as economic golden ages. And yet the people they claimed to champion are still waiting for their share, while the men themselves cashed out spectacularly.
The Clinton Foundation has been a subject of scrutiny for years. Critics have long raised questions about the relationship between foreign donations to the Foundation and Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State — questions the mainstream press largely waved away. But Smith isn’t coming at this from a right-wing angle. He’s coming at it from a common sense one. A broke lawyer from Arkansas does not accumulate nine figures through book royalties and speaking fees alone without some very particular doors being opened for him.
Obama’s situation carries its own set of questions. The presidential salary caps out under $450,000. A senator’s pay is less than that. Twelve years in public office at those rates gets you somewhere around $5 million before taxes, not $70 million. The gap between what the job pays and what these men are worth gets filled in by book deals with major publishers, speaking arrangements with Wall Street firms, and Netflix production deals that would make a Hollywood agent blush.
None of that is illegal. But it does raise a question about who those deals are really for and what they’re really paying for.
What makes Smith’s comments worth paying attention to is exactly who he is. Coming from a Black broadcaster with his own huge audience, the criticism wasn’t easy to wave away as stale right-wing noise. Smith speaks to the same demographic Obama once claimed as his most loyal base. When he starts asking these questions publicly, it means the questions have migrated somewhere the Democrat Party can’t easily quarantine them.
The party has spent two decades building a kind of mythology around both men. Clinton as the brilliant policy wonk who left office with a surplus. Obama as the historic, dignified statesman who restored America’s standing in the world. The mythology requires that both men be seen as selfless public servants who sacrificed for the country. The net worth numbers make that story harder to tell with a straight face.
And the American people have noticed. They’ve been noticing for a while. They just haven’t had many people with Smith’s reach willing to say it plainly on a major platform.
There’s a broader pattern here worth naming. The political class in this country has figured out a very clean racket. You spend a career in government, accumulating influence and access. You leave office. And then the people whose calls you used to take when you were in power start paying you enormous sums to give speeches, sit on boards, and attach your name to foundations. The money flows. The lifestyle improves. And if anyone asks, you point to the book sales.
But the American families who voted for these men, who believed the speeches about fighting for working people, who trusted that the party of the little guy was actually run by people who understood what it felt like to worry about a grocery bill — those families aren’t getting Netflix deals. They’re not getting $500,000 speaking fees from Goldman Sachs. They’re getting higher prices, stagnant wages, and a political class that gets richer every time it claims to be fighting for them.
Smith put it simply: if the people are doing well, fine, get yours. But that’s not what happened. And the numbers don’t lie.
Sources: Fox News, Forbes, Straight Shooter podcast