In this March photo, President Barack Obama shakes hands with former Secretary of State Colin Powell. (AP)
Colin Powell is sending a not-so-subtle message to President Barack Obama – and he might be right.
“I think the president has to, like a razor blade, just go right after the single issue that is uppermost in the minds of the American people, and that's employment,” Powell, the former Secretary of State, said on “Meet the Press” this week.
“And he's done a lot with health care, with cap-and-trade, with education,” Powell said. “And I understand the importance of all of that. But as far as the American people are concerned, the main attack is employment.”
Clearly, Obama has a lot on his plate: Ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; high crime in urban neighborhoods across the country; ongoing issues with immigration reform and challenges with the nation’s educational system.
But it’s the economy that has many Americans worried, and they want jobs, not more speeches.
“I think he has lost some of the ability to connect that he had during the campaign,” Powell said. “And it is not just me picking on the president. It's reflected in the polling."
Whether Powell is “picking on” Obama or not, the numbers don’t lie.
There are nearly 15 million unemployed Americans; the jobless rate stands at 9.6 percent, and the African American unemployment rate is a staggering 16.3 percent - up from 15.4 percent earlier this year.
On Monday, Obama participated in a live CNBC town hall meeting about the economy, where he took questions and discussed his vision for jobs creation.
There’s no question that Obama gets it. He has championed numerous federal initiatives to jump-start the economy, although none of the administration’s efforts are able to reverse the jobless trend.
And the president often sounds frustrated.
“Even though economists may say that the recession officially ended last year,” Obama said, “obviously for the millions of people who are still out of work, people who have seen their home values decline, people who are struggling to pay the bills day to day, it’s still very real for them.”
Obama says the nation lost 750,000 when he was sworn into office in 2009. And he argues that the nation has seen eight months in a row where the government has helped add private sector jobs.
But it’s not enough, and black Americans, Obama acknowledged, have been disproportionately impacted by economic collapse.
“We all understood that during my campaign, this wasn’t just about electing a black president,” Obama said during the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual gala on Saturday. “This was about a plan to rescue our economy and rebuild it on a new foundation.”
“This historic recession, the worst since the Great Depression, has taken a devastating toll on all sectors of our economy,” Obama said. “But as has been true often in our history, as has been true in other recessions, this one came down with a particular vengeance on the African-American community.”
Some black civil rights activists have tried to encourage Obama to devise a strategy to address the black unemployment rate, but the president feels that helping all Americans will ultimately uplift African-Americans in the process.
Powell, a former Bush administration Cabinet member, may not be wildly popular with some African-Americans for his criticism of America’s first black president, but he does have a point.
"[T]he President ... has to, I think, shift the way in which he has been doing things. I think the American people feel that too many programs have come down,” Powell said. “There are so many rocks in our knapsack now that we're having trouble carrying it.”
So, what more can Obama do?
“There are a lot of plans in place that can make improvement, but it’s slow and steady, as opposed to .....
Analysis: Listen to Colin Powell, Mr. President
No comments:
Post a Comment