President Obama spoke today at the beautiful Lake Harriet Band Shell in Minneapolis, Minnesota, taking a few bare knuckled swipes at the obstructionist GOP Congress. Building everything on the story of Rebekah and Ben, struggling young middle-class parents, and inspired by a letter written to him by Rebekah, the President laid the blame for the pressures on such Americans squarely at the feet of obstructionist Republicans in Congress.
If we do some basic things, if we make some basic changes, we can create more jobs and lift more incomes and strengthen the middle class. And that’s what we should be doing. And I know it drives you nuts that Washington isn’t doing it. And it drives me nuts. (Applause.) And the reason it’s not getting done is, today, even basic commonsense ideas can’t get through this Congress.
Go out into the tall grass for more.
As the crowd quickly warmed to this theme, the President continued:
Republicans in Congress have blocked or voted down every single serious idea to strengthen the middle class. You may think I’m exaggerating, but let me go through the list. They’ve said no to raising the minimum wage. They’ve said no to fair pay. Some of them have denied that there’s even a problem, despite the fact that women are getting paid 77 cents for every dollar a man is getting paid.
They’ve said no to extending unemployment insurance for more than three million Americans who are out there looking every single day for a new job, despite the fact that we know it would be good not just for those families who are working hard to try to get back on their feet, but for the economy as a whole. Rather than invest in working families getting ahead, they actually voted to give another massive tax cut to the wealthiest Americans.
Continuing to rouse the crowd, the President graciously conceded that only some of his opponents are bad people. Others are simply well enough intentioned, but craven and cowed into inaction by the tea party. He then went on:
They think we should give more tax breaks to those at the top. They think we should invest less in things like education. They think we should let big banks, and credit card companies, and polluters, and insurers do only whatever is best for their bottom line without any responsibility to anybody else. They want to drastically reduce or get rid of the safety net for people trying to work their way into the middle class.
And if we did all these things, they think the economy will thrive and jobs will prosper, and everything will trickle down.
And just because they believe it, it doesn’t mean the rest of us should be believing it -- because we’ve tried what they’re peddling, and it doesn’t work. We know from our history that our economy does not grow from the top down, it grows from the middle out. We do better when the middle class does better. We do better when workers are getting a decent salary. We do better when they’ve got decent benefits. (Applause.)
The President concluded his attack on Congress:
We do better when if somebody is stuck in a job that is not paying well enough, they know they can go get retrained without taking on huge mountains of debt. That’s when things hum. And with just a few changes in priorities, we could get a lot of that done right now if Congress would actually just think about you and not about getting reelected, not about the next election, not about some media sound bite, but just focus on you. (Applause.)
At this point, the President's speech segued to the steps he had taken under Executive authority to improve policy despite Congressional Republicans, deftly circling back to his attack on Congress with a
riposte (highlighted in
Jed Lewison's diary) to
Speaker Boehner's threats of a lawsuit.
And, now, some of you may have read -- so we take these actions and then now Republicans are mad at me for taking these actions. They’re not doing anything, and then they’re mad that I’m doing something. I’m not sure which of the things I’ve done they find most offensive, but they’ve decided they’re going to sue me for doing my job. I mean, I might have said in the heat of the moment during one of these debates, “I want to raise the minimum wage, so sue me when I do.” (Laughter.) But I didn’t think they were going to take it literally.
I hope President Obama goes all over the country and makes speeches like this, a lot, between now and November. Defeat Congressional Republicans.
h/t to Transcripts Editor for the complete transcript of the President's remarks.
Here is a Town Hall appearance in Minneapolis yesterday where the President sounded some of the same themes.