9/18/11, "Cleaver: If Obama wasn't president, we would be ‘marching on the White House’," Alicia Cohn
"Unhappy members of the Congressional Black Caucus “probably would be marching on the White House” if Obama were not president, according to CBC Chairman Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.).
"If [former President] Bill Clinton had been in the White House and had failed to address this problem, we probably would be marching on the White House," Cleaver told “The Miami Herald” in comments published Sunday. "There is a less-volatile reaction in the CBC because nobody wants to do anything
- that would empower the people who hate the president."...
- (It's not about hate, Rep. Cleaver. It's about the country. ed.)
"We’re supportive of the president, but we getting tired, y’all,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) said in August. “We want to give [Obama] every opportunity, but our people are hurting. The unemployment is unconscionable. We don’t know what the strategy is."
Rather than targeting Obama’s leadership, many CBC members aimed their fire at the Tea Party movement over the summer’s congressional recess. Waters said in a public meeting in her district that the Tea Party "can go straight to hell." Another member, Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.), called the Tea Party “the real enemy” seeking to hold Congress “hostage.”
Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), the only Republican member of the CBC and also a member of the Tea Party Caucus, objected to hostile language used by members targeting the Tea Party movement and threatened to leave the caucus unless Cleaver condemned remarks made by other members. West singled out comments from Rep. André Carson (D-Ind.), the CBC’s whip, who said that Tea Party-affiliated members of Congress see African-Americans as "second-class citizens" and would be
- happy to see them "hanging from a tree."
.
No comments:
Post a Comment