Maureen Dowd On President Obama's Jobs Bill Speech and the Dire Necessity To Revive His Administration (Before It's Too Late)

Maureen Dowd
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/opinion/sunday/dowd-sleeping-barry-awakes.html?src=un&feedurl=http://json8.nytimes.com/pages/opinion/index.jsonp

"As always, the same questions persist in our long, fruitless effort to pierce the Obama opacity. How long can the president sustain the sizzle before the fizzle? Does he get it together when the country’s in trouble or when he’s in trouble?"

"It’s still impossible to sum up what Obama’s presidency is about right now, except saving his own job."

All,

Though many of his supporters simply don't wanna hear it about this President, I think Maureen Dowd is unfortunately 100% correct in her general assessment of Obama's mixed and confused motives...Let's face facts: Obama's biggest and most disturbing character flaw (which far too often rules his political instincts and thus his general goals, strategy, and tactics) is and has always been HUBRIS. When the overweening demands and desires of personal ego begin to dictate and guide how one approaches the resolution of problems--and the resulting insecurities when things inevitably go against you or when unforseen adversity strikes--it serves as a big and very distracting impediment to having the courage, tenacity, integrity, and perserverance that it takes to get important things done--whether a large number of people oppose, hate, or dismiss you or not. One can't possibly be "loved" or even "liked" by "everyone" and it's a sign of real weakness in a person when they think they can simply 'charm' or impress people enough to either receive their fawning, uncritical support and/or effectively neutralize ones opposition enough to make it possible to ultimately prevail in any and all circumstances. When one stupidly "negotiates from behind" all the time as Obama invariably and inexplicably does when locked in any battle with his and our political and ideological enemies, it doesn't suggest-- as Obama keeps vainly insisting-- that he is simply trying to be 'fair, objective, and balanced' in his approach but rather that he is simply afraid of them and their fierce opposition because it would expose him to being publicly rebuffed and thus embarrassed. But of course this kind of opposition does lead to Obama's enemies rebuffing his advances and he winds up being both defeated and embarrassed anyway. So it's a double bind of his own making (or subconscious/unconscious choosing). This is the eternal dilemma that Obama finds himself in because he is not fundamentally informed or guided by a firm commitment to specific PRINCIPLES and VALUES which supersede and transcend one's personal ego involvement and which determine how and why one engages their opposition in the public and private combat over ideas, priorities, and desires...
Kofi


OP-ED COLUMNIST

Sleeping Barry Awakes
By MAUREEN DOWD
September 10, 2011
New York Times

WASHINGTON

The president was strong and House Republicans were conciliatory.

There was only one teensy-weensy problem: The president is weak and House Republicans are obstructionist.

Congressional Republicans, heeding polls indicating that their all-out assault on President Obama was risky, finally tempered their public comments after the jobs speech on Thursday and stopped acting like big jerks.

Obama, heeding plummeting polls and beseeching voices from his despairing base, finally deigned to get tough.

In the capital of political tactics, it was just another fine day of faking it.

The president’s supporters had a single reaction to the fiery address to Congress: It’s about time. But as before when Obama had tried to pivot to jobs, an emergency intervened: Democratic surrogates on TV had to talk about the 9/11 plot before being able to talk about the jobs plan.

In case reporters were too dense to get the point, Eric Cantor’s office underlined it in an unsubtle press release. The headline, “Cantor, House Republicans Strike New Tone, Focus On Areas Of Common Ground,” acknowledged that the snarky, obstreperous old tone wasn’t working for them.

Cantor, the House majority leader, who has had an antagonistic relationship with the president, also wrote an op-ed piece for The Richmond Times-Dispatch demurely titled, “Job Creation — A Priority Both Sides Can Agree On.”

Acting less like the bane of Obama’s existence, John Boehner encouraged Republicans to attend the speech and offered no formal response.

Slyly going into Cantor territory on Friday, the president promised a sustained campaign to sell Americans on his plan. A re-energized Obama urged students at the University of Richmond to lobby lawmakers: “I want you to call, I want you to e-mail, I want you to tweet, I want you to fax, I want you to visit, I want you to Facebook, send a carrier pigeon.” (No letters? No wonder the Postal Service is going bust.)

As always, the same questions persist in our long, fruitless effort to pierce the Obama opacity. How long can the president sustain the sizzle before the fizzle? Does he get it together when the country’s in trouble or when he’s in trouble?

Certainly, Obama cares that Americans are in pain. Yet he has been unable to move away from his academic disdain for hardball and his alpha addiction to buzzer-beating wins.

So while the country has grown ever more scared, miserable, broke and broken, the president has too often been absent, quiet, ambivalent, impenetrable and inscrutable.

The master of his own narrative in print let the Republicans define the narrative in politics. And Obama likes to come in late, after the other players have staked out positions. It’s a strangely risk-averse tact, given the fact that he took two of the boldest risks in history — jumping into the presidential race in the first place and giving the kill order on Bin Laden on sketchy intelligence.

But when his polls plummeted, the Sleeping Beauty President roused himself to transform back into a semblance of the 2008 electrifying phenomenon.

He always must be chided and cajoled before he gets re-engaged. Among other times, it happened during his campaign, when key donors went public with their displeasure at his laconic attitude.

He’s eternally the gifted and sometimes indolent student who has to be wooed and pressured into making the game-winning shot. As one aide joked, “We work 6 to 9 and he works 9 to 6.”

But the odd rhythms of his temperament are less interesting when so much is at stake. Bill Clinton drifted for a time during his presidency, also needing the guillotine to focus his mind. But at least he was drifting on an ocean of peace and prosperity. Disengaging when the United States and the world are going to hell is playing with fire.

We never knew which Clinton would show up: Saturday Night Bill, as Dick Morris called the man of uncurbed appetites, or Sunday Morning Bill, a talented and passionate pol. Now Obama offers his own version of the split-personality presidency: Do we get Energizer Barry or Enervating Barry?

It’s deeply confusing to a country that’s already confused, as well as to the Democratic Party. Will he ever get that through his magnificent brain? The nation deserves clarity and consistency.

Each time Obama goes through a period of lying doggo, his opponents — from Hillary in the primaries to the Tea Party in the summer of 2009 to the House Republicans during the debt-ceiling debacle — get an infusion of oxygen.

The reawakened Republicans are no longer the loyal opposition. They’re revolutionary Bolsheviks who want to eat Obama alive.

When the president stays insulated with his little circle that doesn’t know how to push his messages, and he lets the nihilist Republicans go unchallenged in their crazy claims to be saving the country they’re hurting, he sets the stage for Rick Perry.

It’s still impossible to sum up what Obama’s presidency is about right now, except saving his own job.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/us/politics/09payroll.html?ref=economy


Obama Challenges Congress on Job Plan

Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Obama presented a jobs plan to a joint session of Congress on Thursday night in the Capitol.

By MARK LANDLER
September 8, 2011
New York Times


WASHINGTON — Mixing politically moderate proposals with a punchy tone, President Obama challenged lawmakers on Thursday to “pass this jobs bill” — a blunt call on Congress to enact his $447 billion package of tax cuts and new government spending, designed to revive a stalling economy and his own political standing.

Speaking to a joint session of Congress, Mr. Obama ticked off a list of measures that he emphasized had been supported by both Republicans and Democrats in the past. To keep the proposals from adding to the swelling federal deficit, Mr. Obama also said he would encourage a more ambitious target for long-term reduction of the deficit.

“You should pass this jobs plan right away,” the president declared over and over in his 32-minute speech, in which he eschewed his trademark soaring oratory in favor of a plainspoken appeal for action, stiffened by a few sarcastic political jabs.

With Republicans listening politely but with stone-faced expressions, Mr. Obama said, “The question is whether, in the face of an ongoing national crisis, we can stop the political circus and actually do something to help the economy.”

Though Mr. Obama’s proposals — including an expansion of a cut in payroll taxes and new spending on public works — were widely expected, the package was substantially larger than predicted, and much of the money would flow into the economic bloodstream in 2012. The pace would be similar to that of the $787 billion stimulus package passed in 2009, which was spread over more than two years. Analysts said that, if passed, the package would likely lift growth somewhat.

While Republicans did not often applaud Mr. Obama,, party leaders greeted his proposals with uncharacteristic conciliation. Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, and other Republicans signaled a willingness to consider at least some of the measures, reflecting what some have described as anger in their home districts over the political dysfunction in Washington.

“The proposals the president outlined tonight merit consideration,” Speaker John A. Boehner said in a statement. “We hope he gives serious consideration to our ideas as well.”

Still, analysts said it was unlikely that the White House would win Congressional approval for many elements of the package.

For Mr. Obama, burdened by the lowest approval ratings of his presidency, the address crystallized the multiple challenges he faces, among them reviving a torpid economy with a Republican House that, however receptive some of its leaders appeared Thursday, has staked out a relentlessly confrontational course with the White House. The president must also shake off a perception, after so many speeches on the economy, that he has not delivered on the promise of his oratory.

After weeks on the defensive, however, Mr. Obama seemed to get off his back foot. He framed the debate over the economy as a tug-of-war between mainstream American values and a radical, antigovernment orthodoxy that holds that “the only thing we can do restore prosperity is just dismantle government, refund everyone’s money, let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they’re on their own.”

With a difficult re-election bid looming, Mr. Obama declared that his vision would appeal to more voters. “These are real choices we have to make,” he said. “And I’m pretty sure I know what most Americans would choose. It’s not even close.”

At times, he edged into sarcasm. Promoting the extension in the payroll tax cut to Republicans, Mr. Obama said: “I know some of you have sworn oaths never to raise any taxes on anyone for as long as you live. Now is not the time to carve out an exception and raise middle-class taxes, which is why you should pass this bill right away.”

The centerpiece of the bill, known as the American Jobs Act, is an extension and expansion of the cut in payroll taxes, worth $240 billion, under which the tax paid by employees would be cut in half through 2012. Smaller businesses would also get a cut in their payroll taxes, as well as a tax holiday for hiring new employees. The plan also provides $140 billion for modernizing schools and repairing roads and bridges — spending that Mr. Obama portrayed as critical to maintaining America’s competitiveness.

The president insisted that everything in the package would be paid for by raising the target for long-term spending cuts to be negotiated by a special Congressional committee. He did not go through the arithmetic, but said he would send a detailed proposal to Congress in a week. Senior White House officials said the amount of increased spending cuts would hinge on how much of the plan gets through Congress.

Mr. Obama said most of his proposals had support from both parties, a contention that Republican leaders rejected. “There should be nothing controversial about this piece of legislation,” he said. “Everything in here is the kind of proposal that’s been supported by Democrats and Republicans.”

After a summer consumed by bitter debate over how to reduce the debt and deficit, Mr. Obama kept his focus squarely on the need to create jobs. He acknowledged that the government’s role in fixing the problem was limited, but rejected the Republican argument that Washington’s major contribution would be to eliminate regulations.

“Ultimately, our recovery will be driven not by Washington, but by our businesses and our workers,” he said. “But we can help. We can make a difference. There are steps we can take right now to improve people’s lives.”

Still, even if every one of the proposals were passed by Congress — something that is extremely unlikely to happen — the measures would not solve the economy’s problems, forecasters say, though they would likely spur some growth.

And that encapsulates the quandary for Mr. Obama: so long as there is no evidence of improvement in the job market, his economic call to arms — backed by a familiar list of proposed remedies — may not resonate with an American public grown weary of stagnation and an unemployment rate stuck at 9.1 percent.

Even the scheduling of the speech set off a tempest when Mr. Boehner rejected Mr. Obama’s request to address Congress on Wednesday, the night of a Republican presidential debate. At Mr. Boehner’s request, the White House agreed to move the date to Thursday, which meant Mr. Obama had to wrap up his remarks before the New Orleans Saints and the Green Bay Packers kicked off the N.F.L. season. As Mr. Obama was entering the chamber, microphones caught him assuring a lawmaker that his speech would not interfere with the game.

In setting out his program, Mr. Obama was, in effect, daring Republicans not to pass measures that enjoy support among independent voters and business leaders. If the Republicans refuse to embrace at least some of the measures, administration officials said, Mr. Obama will take them directly to the American public, portraying Congress as do-nothing and obstructionist.

“Maybe some of you have decided that those differences are so great that we can only resolve them at the ballot box,” Mr. Obama told the lawmakers. “But know this: the next election is fourteen months away. And the people who sent us here — the people who hired us to work for them — they don’t have the luxury of waiting fourteen months.”

John Nichols On Why President Obama's Speech On Thursday Had Better Fully Address The Massive Dimensions of the National Unemployment Crisis

http://www.thenation.com/blog/163118/obama-better-give-one-hell-speech

All,

Just how truly horrible is the national economy? Check out this disturbing report by prominent political analyst and activist John Nichols...

Kofi


Obama Better Give One Hell of a Speech
John Nichols
September 2, 2011
The Nation


On the eve of a Labor Day that will mark the unofficial launching place of his 2012 re-election campaign, on the eve of an address to Congress that could be the most important of his presidency, there is no good economic news for Barack Obama.

A net total of zero jobs were added in the month of August, for which economic data was released Friday morning.

In addition, Friday’s report revealed, the number of hours worked by the average American has begun to decline.

And hourly earnings have dropped.

So even if Americans are employed, they are working less and making less.

“These numbers, with no net job creation at all—and 14 million people officially unemployed—show that the economy is dead in the water.” says Roger Hickey of the Campaign for America’s Future.

But that’s not the scariest part of the story.

While the official unemployment rate held steady at 9.1 percent—almost twice the level that former US Senator Hubert Humphrey and former US Congressman Gus Hawkins identified as a unacceptable when they were pushing their Humphrey-Hawkins full-employment bill in the 1970s—the real rate continues to grow worse.

The broad measure of unemployment—the Department of Labor’s U-6 figure, which includes the long-term unemployed and under-employed—rose to 16.2 percent (from 16.1 percent in July). That’s the highest level this year.

The 16.2 percent figure is, by any honest measure, the real unemployment rate. And it is ticking upward.

Why? Because the United States has failed to create jobs at a rate to keep up with population growth.

How big a failure are we talking about?

Consider these facts:

The number of employed Americans in the summer of 2011 was 139,296,000.

The number of employed Americans in summer of 2004 was 139,556,000.

So there are 260,000 fewer people working today than when George Bush was in his first term as president. Yet, the US population grew during the period from 2004 to 2011 by almost 20 million—from 292,892,000 in July 2004 to 312,150,000 today.

Tens of millions of Americans who have stopped looking for work, who never had work or who are severely underemployed live in the shadows—unreflected in the official figures. “Long-term unemployment remains at record levels, and 25 million Americans who want work can’t get full-time jobs,” says National Employment Law Project director Christine Owens. “Midlife job losers fear they’ll never work again, while young people yearn for any start. Economic growth has barely dented the yawning jobs deficit, and those jobs we are adding are largely low-wage. Earnings are stagnant for most workers and have fallen for the lowest-paid.”

As job growth literately grinds to a halt, the crisis becomes all the more evident. And Owens states the obvious yet critical point: “This distressing news sets the stage for President Obama’s address to Congress next week on jobs and the economy.”

President Obama is starting to recognize this reality.

He’s going to give that “major” address to Congress on Thursday.

And he’s going to talk about some kind of jobs program.

But Obama has yet to display the sense of urgency that is required.

He wasted the summer on a ridiculous debt-ceiling debate that—with the establishment of the Congressional “super committee” on debt and deficit reduction—“ended” with a commitment to continue the wrangling.

Now, even as he has focused on the jobs crisis, Obama continues to send weak signals.

The worst of those weak signals took the form of the wrestling this week over when to schedule his speech before Congress.

With America teetering on the brink of potentially severe recession, a president who is in charge does not worry about scheduling conflicts with a partisan debate involving his potential opponents—as Obama did—or a football game. He says that some issues are more important than politics or football.

Obama did not do that. It was a mistake.

There is much talk about how the president has to “go big” with his jobs speech. There’s no question that this is true. But there are many ways to “go big.” For Obama to succeed next week—and he must succeed if he hopes to right the course not just of his presidency but of the economy—he must hit all the bases.

1. His speech must inspire confidence that he has a plan for job creation, that the plan can he measured in real time and that there is an end goal. Obama cannot talk vaguely about creating jobs or improving the economy. He ought not peddle false hope or fantasy, He should come on strong with specfic plans, specific goals and specific timelines,

2. To inspire that confidence, he must be willing to say that his plan is essential and cannot be compromised or dialed down. Obama’s failure to do this with the original stimulus plan of 2009 robbed that initiative of the resources needed to provide a sufficient jump-start to the economy.

3. Obama’s plan must provide incentives for the private sector to create jobs in the United States—not overseas. If he includes a major free-trade component his initiative will—according to studies by government and non-government analysts—lead to increased unemployment.

4. Obama’s plan must recognize that the most severe layoffs right now are taking place at the state and local government and school district levels—550,000 jobs lost since the fall of 2008. State and local government layoffs are triply damaging to the economy, as they create greater unemployment, reduce buying power for teachers and others who tend to spend a lot on Main Street for supplies, and cut services that are more needed in a time of recession. The president needs to include federal funding to keep local government functioning and even, where possible, to expand services. CAF’s Hickey is right when he says: “The policy of our government is systematically undermining the recovery. Public sector layoffs are undermining consumer buying power, crippling the ability of the private sector to sell products and services. Clearly, President Obama must reverse this downward spiral by creating jobs directly, putting money in consumer’s pockets, and helping small and large companies to find buyers and invest in growth.”

5. Obama has to talk about how to fund his program, so that he does not get bogged down in the usual DC debate about spending. If the debate about renewing the economy becomes a spending fight, Republicans in the House will prevent anything meaningful from happening. There has to be a revenue component and Obama should be talking about taxing Wall Street and financial speculation. Even if he does not get everything he asks for, it will shift the focus of the debate away from the spending fight to a real dialogue about whether billionaires ought to aid a recovery—or continue to stream money out of the real economy and into the paper economy of the speculators.

The president should take a cue from Progressive Democrats of America national director Tim Carpenter, who says, “America’s working families have lost their homes, jobs, and healthcare. Young people can’t afford the price of college, can’t find jobs, and older folks can’t retire because of an economy destroyed by greedy Wall Street corporations. It is only fair that Wall Street pay for the destruction they have wrought.”

Robert Reich Strongly Reminds Us And the President What the U.S. Economy Really Needs

(Image: JR / t r u t h o u t)

http://www.truth-out.org/zero-economy/1315143274

All,

I and many others said all this and more a couple days ago. But it certainly bears repeating over and over again until SOMEBODY actually listens and ACTS on what it means...Acclaimed economist, Professor at UC, Berkeley, and former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration Robert Reich reminds us in crystal clear language what we all need to know and do about the national economy at this point in history...

Kofi


The Zero Economy
4 September 2011
by Robert Reich
Robert Reich's Blog | Op-Ed


The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday no jobs were created in August. Zero. Nada.

Well, not quite. The strike at Verizon reduced the labor force by 45,000. Minnesota government employees returned to work, adding 22,000. So in reality, America added 23,000 jobs. Almost zero.

In reality, worse than zero. We need 125,000 a month merely to keep up with population growth. So the hole continues to deepen.

Since this Depression began at the end of 2007, America’s potential labor force – working-age people who want jobs – has grown by over 7 million. But since then the number of Americans with jobs has shrunk by more than 300,000.

If this doesn’t prompt President Obama to unveil a bold jobs plan next Thursday, I don’t know what will.

The problem is on the demand side. Consumers (whose spending is 70 percent of the economy) can’t boost the economy on their own. They’re still too burdened by debt, especially on homes that are worth less than their mortgages. Their jobs are disappearinig, their pay is dropping, their medical bills are soaring.

And businesses won’t hire without more sales.

So we’re in a vicous cycle.

Republicans continue to claim businesses aren’t hiring because they’re uncertain about regulatory costs. Or they can’t find the skilled workers they need.

Baloney. If these were the reasons businesses weren’t hiring – and demand were growing – you’d expect companies to make more use of their current employees. The length of the average workweek would be increasing.

But the length of the average workweek has been dropping. In August it declined for the third month in a row, to 34.2 hours. That’s back to where it was at the start of the year – barely longer than what it was at its shortest point two years ago (33.7 hours in June 2009).

It’s demand, stupid.

So what does a sane nation do when the consumers and businesses can’t boost the economy on their own?

Government becomes the purchaser of last resort. It hires directly (a new WPA and Civilian Conservation Corps, for example). It helps states and locales, so they don’t have to continue to slash payrolls and public services. (The help could be structured as a loan, to be repaid when unemployment drops to, say, 6 percent.)

And it hires indirectly — contracting with companies to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, including school buildings, to take another example.

Not only does this create jobs but also puts money in the hands of all the people who get the jobs, so they can turn around and buy the goods and services they need – generating more jobs.

Get it? Not exactly rocket science.

So why don’t Republicans get it? Either they’re knaves – they want the economy to stay awful through next Election Day so Obama gets the boot. Or they’re fools – they’ve bought the lie that reducing the deficit now creates more jobs.

Every time you hear anyone say we’re “broke” or “can’t afford to spend more,” tell them we’ll be in worse shape if we don’t. If the economy remains dead in the water, the ratio of public debt to GDP balloons.

And remind them that the federal government can now borrow at fire-sale rates. Interest on the ten-year Treasury bill is 2 percent.

Do you hear me, Mr. President? Please — be bold next week. And if, as expected, Republicans refuse to go along, take it to the people. Mobilize the public. Use the bully pulpit. That’s what you have it for.

One more thing, Mr. President. You also have to tackle inequality. When so much income and wealth continues to flow to the very top, America’s vast middle class still won’t have enough purchasing power to boost the economy. Priming the pump is necessary but won’t be sufficient without enough water in the well.

We Must Continue to Confront the 21st Century Realities of Race and Class in the 'Age of Obama'

'Let me hear you say 'black', Maxine Waters said. | AP Photo

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/61912.html


All,

YES!!! Now we're talking! I knew I could ultimately count on Representative Maxine Waters and other responsible and genuinely concerned liberal/progressive black politicians and activists to finally confront the President on the vital question of the ugly crisis of national black unemployment and the massive racist campaign against African Americans generally led by the Tea Party and the Republican right. FINALLY someone in the Democratic Party is trying to hold Obama ACCOUNTABLE for addressing crucial issues that should have been seriously addressed from Day One of the Obama Administration. IT'S ABOUT DAMN TIME!! I was beginning to think that large numbers of black folks had simply lost their minds and their common sense as well and were stumbling around in some fantasy ridden dreamlike state merely because the President is black. As millions of other progressive black, white, Latino, and Asian Americans (who BTW--we should never forget-- actually supported and VOTED FOR the President in 2008!) have been saying for nearly three years now: WE MUST ALL FIGHT FOR A TRULY PROGRESSIVE AGENDA ACROSS THE BOARD AND STAND UP AND DEFEAT OUR BRAZEN RACIST RIGHTWING ENEMIES IN THE NATIONAL POLITICAL SPHERE AS WELL AS IN OUR EVERYDAY LIVES. Time is running out and we CAN'T WAIT any longer. When the President makes his highly anticipated speech about a national jobs bill after Labor Day he had better come clean no matter what the Republicans and the Tea Party think and no matter what kind of intolerant political bullying and pathological lying they will most certainly attempt to engage in. HE AND WE MUST STAND UP AND TELL THEM AS MAXINE SAID TO "GO STRAIGHT TO HELL!" The needs, desires, and aspirations of all poor, working, and middle class American citizens who comprise the great majority of the country (and that most emphatically INCLUDES BLACK PEOPLE) must be attended to first and foremost and if the reactionary wealthy oppose us we must do everything in our massive collective power to push them aside as well. As always what we most need to know is this: WHOSE SIDE IS THE PRESIDENT ON? Only he and he alone can answer that paramount question but it had better be the RIGHT ANSWER...The stakes are far too high for anymore rhetorical bullshit coming from either the White House OR Congress...Time for us all to "get busy or get lost"...

Kofi


Waters to Obama aide: Say 'black'
By: Jennifer Epstein
August 23, 2011

Rep. Maxine Waters and other black leaders lobbed heated questions at one of President Barack Obama’s top jobs advisers Monday, pressing him to confirm the White House is focusing on creating jobs in struggling African-American communities — and to say the word “black.”

Don Graves, the executive director of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, said at a nighttime forum at a black church in Miami that the president is “focused on every community across the country,” The Miami Herald reported.

But when he added that “certain communities have been hit harder than other communities,” Waters pushed him. “Let me hear you say ‘black,’” the California Democrat said.

As the crowd cheered, The Washington Post said in its report on the Congressional Black Caucus-sponsored event, Graves quietly said: “black, African-American, Latino — we’re going to focus on getting people back to work.”

The approach that assisting all communities helps African-Americans get jobs is “a bunch of bull,” Rep. Laura Richardson (D-Calif.) said, according to the Post. Later, she asked Graves whether he would help shuttle dozens of pieces of jobs legislation authored by CBC members to the president so he could enact them using executive authority.

“You all don’t need to go through me to get to the president,” Graves said.

But Richardson disagreed. “Let’s be honest. We have met with the president. We are asking you in the capacity of your position [at the council on] jobs, are you willing to review our bills, to work with us?”

“You may not feel like the president is listening to you, but he hears you loud and clear,” Graves said, referring to the growing frustration from African-Americans that was on view last week as Waters spoke at a much-covered CBC town hall in Detroit.

Graves said that one obstacle to job creation are “folks who are going to stand in the way and block the legislation that the Congressional Black Caucus has proposed.”

Waters interrupted him. “What people are you talking about?” she said, according to the Herald. “Say tea party. Say it!”

Graves did, though the Post described him as doing so “reluctantly.” “It was tea party Republicans,” he said.

Waters hasn’t been shy about her criticism of the tea party movement. At the event over the weekend, after being attacked by tea party-affiliated Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) as an “overseer” of the “21st century plantation” of blacks in the Democratic Party, Waters said “the tea party can go straight to hell.”

The day after West criticized Waters and other black Democrats, his younger brother was at a job fair that Waters and other CBC members had organized in Atlanta. (West is the only Republican member of the CBC.)

But Waters wasn’t the only person on the dais Monday night who was attacking the tea party movement. Rev. Jesse Jackson, who West also described as an “overseer” said that the movement should be called the “Fort Sumter tea party that sought to maintain states’ rights and slavery,” the Herald reported.

“The tea party is a new name on an old game,” he said. “Dr. King fought a ‘tea party’ in Alabama. … He had no weapons, but he confronted the tea party.”



© 2011 POLITICO LLC

http://www.politico.com/politico44/perm/0811/sermon_on_the_green_17a363d0-4817-479e-8b75-d72de47387f8.html

Freeman to POTUS: 'Get pissed off'
By GLENN THRUSH
08/22/11
POLITICO 44

'If I could vote for him 1,000 times, I would,' Freeman said of Obama. AP Photo

When President Obama jumped on the back nine of the celebrity-clogged Vineyard Golf Club course on Sunday, he ran into none other than Morgan Freeman, Oscar winner and Obama backer.

Freeman, it turns out, was as free with advice for Obama as he was for Tim Robbins in “The Shawshank Redemption.” (POLITICO was holding outside the course in the pool van, told only that Obama was playing with his usual island foursome.)

But the deeply wired Boston Globe, invaluable for Vineyard gossip, caught up with Freeman at an event later in the day.

“What I wanted to tell him is to get pissed off, get fighting mad,” the actor told the paper. “But I know he won’t because he doesn’t think it’s politically smart.”

On Obama’s chances for reelection, Freeman added, “If I could vote for him 1,000 times, I would.”

“I think he’s been horribly sandbagged, and it makes me so angry,” he said.