A fired-up POTUS downright shouted at the Congressional Black Caucus in a speech Saturday night, adopting his fiery preacher cadence and dropping his “g’s” at will in a booming crescendo in which he urged the CBC to “stop complaining.”
“Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes. Shake it off. Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying. We are going to press on. We’ve got work to do, CBC,” Obama exclaimed, before closing with a “God Bless America” and audibly thwacking the side of the podium before walking offstage.
Obama’s speech focused on the impact his new stimulus efforts would have on blacks — whose unemployment rate sits at a whopping 16.7 percent. It seems to have been well received by the CBC:
After the speech, several CBC members said they were pleased with the message. Rep. Donna Edwards, D-Maryland, said it was a “call to action.” She said both sides of the aisle know where the battlelines are drawn on the issues and that complaining about that will not accomplish anything, members must fight for what they want.
“He showed he’s going to fight,” she said.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, said the president “took his gloves off” and that it was the right approach. “This is the first day of the beginning of a season of pressure” on Republicans in Congress, she said. “I think that this is now, for his own sake, a sense of reckoning that although his temperament as president of the United States for everybody – is to include everyone – there’s a time now that the marching has to begin, because he’s got to save this country and we’re willing to save it with him.”
More here.