The Most Pathetic Woman On Earth

I use the term woman lightly...

(Politico) — In advance of the president’s speech to a joint session of Congress tonight, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), fresh of the CBC’s national jobs tour, is demanding that Obama make clear what he’s going to do to help communities suffering through the worst of a bad economy. In very clear terms, she challenges the president to spend as much energy working to create jobs in the black community as he is campaigning for votes in one of the whitest states in the nation. Here are excerpts from Waters’s statement, which will be released widely later today:

“If the unemployment rates in the African American Community continue to climb, like they did in August by almost a full percentage point, those African American voters who came out to the polls for the first time in 2008 but who have since lost their home and/or their job, may not return to the polls. Therefore, targeting public policy to a community who accounted for 13 percent of the electorate in ’08, and who is now experiencing the culmination of a decade of economic crisis, is not just good policy, but good politics,” Waters says, “There are roughly three million African Americans out of work today, a number nearly equal to the entire population of Iowa. I would suggest that if the entire population of Iowa, a key state on the electoral map and a place that served as a stop on the president’s jobs bus tour were unemployed, they would be mentioned in the president’s speech and be the beneficiary of targeted public policy. So, one question to be answered this evening is, are the unemployed in the African American community, including almost 45 percent of its youth, as important as the people of Iowa?”

H/T Weasel Zippers