And the award for most over-dramatic performance by a CBC official goes to, drumroll please . . . this woman!
Last summer, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., drew attention to discontent with President Obama in the black community when she asked the audience at a Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) town hall in Detroit to “unleash” her and the CBC on Obama.
Waters was trying to appease “a very angry, primarily black audience,” CBC executive director Angela Rye explained during a CSPAN interview yesterday. “This was one of the scariest moments of my life,” Rye said in an interview indicating — though she downplayed the fact — the degree of frustration with President Obama felt by the black community at that time. “I was scared for the members,” she said, adding that she considered shutting down the meeting and calling “to have [the CBC members] escorted out by the police.”
Rye denied that the audience was angry at Obama, despite the criticism of the president expressed by Waters and the crowd. “They weren’t angry about the president, they were angry about the economy and the state of jobs or lack thereof in Detroit. It was scary,” she said. “And I think the reason for that was I’ve never seen people so angry and so hurt and so frustrated and you went into Detroit for that jobs initiative, it was like a ghost town in downtown Detroit.”