Valerie Jarrett, a senior advisor to President Barack Obama and also Chair of the White House Council on Women and Girls, was the luncheon keynote speaker at the North Carolina Governor's Conference for Women in Charlotte today and we asked her a few questions too.
With the flurry of executive orders Obama has issued lately - his latest came Monday in an order directing the Food and Drug Administration to increase efforts to reduce shortages of some prescription drugs - we asked why didn't the president take the initiative sooner to provide financial help, especially on college loans and mortgages? Is now special for some reason (hint, hint - election season is revving up?
Jarrett said many of these things "have been in the works for a while." She said the administration has been listening "to everyday people" and has been working for some time on ways to help. But there was also the Republicans in Congress, she noted.
"The president was frustrated that they couldn't put politics aside and provide some help for the American people."
We asked if there were more executive orders to come and she said yes, "look for them." We tried to wheedle some information on future orders, but she didn't bite.
We also asked her a question some in this state - a state that was in question for Obama in the last president election for hours and among the last to turn blue for him - will likely have on their minds as unemployment still hangs in double digits: He's had a chance to get the economy back on its feet and hasn't delivered, why should voters vote for him next November rather than giving someone else a chance?
The president has "created the environment for growth," she said. He inherited a horrible economy but has worked hard to help people get back to work. "He's always said it would take a long time," given how bad things were, she said. But she said the president's vision "is very optimistic" and sets the country up to be "globally competitive." That's in "sharp contrast" to the Republican vision, she said, that would "rather preserve tax loopholes for the very wealthy."
She said President Obama would "earn each and every vote in North Carolina" and would spend as much time here as necessary to do so. "It's a very important state, really important."
With the Democratic National Convention here next September, that's already apparent. But given that Obama only won the state by 14,000 votes in 2008, the administration has a lot of work to do to capture it again.
Posted by associate editor Fannie Flono for the Observer editorial board.
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Jarrett: N.C. is "really important state"
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5 comments:
Obama will not dupe most North Carolinians twice. He will win Charlotte, maybe Mecklenburg County because of the large influx of blacks from the northeast but he will not win the state. Spend your money here, we can us it, but it's going to be wasted in the end if you're expecting results from it!
Just anothe Chicago hack thug, goodle Jarrett slumlord because they "care" about poor from Hot Air:
In an uncommonly hard-hitting investigative piece, the Boston Globe’s Binyamin Appelbaum blew the whistle on the rodent-infested, sewage-clogged Chicago slums run by the Obamas’ most trusted confidante. Jarrett refused to answer any questions about Grove Parc, “citing what she called a continuing duty to Habitat’s former business partners.” A “continuing duty,” presumably, to whitewash the inconvenient truth about the failed public-private partnerships the Obamas continue to promote in the White House:
“They are rapidly displacing poor people, and these companies are profiting from this displacement,” said Matt Ginsberg-Jaeckle of Southside Together Organizing for Power, a community group that seeks to help tenants stay in the same neighborhoods.
“The same exact people who ran these places into the ground,” the private companies paid to build and manage the city’s affordable housing, “now are profiting by redeveloping them.”
In 2006, while Valerie Jarrett was executive vice president of Grove Parc’s management firm Habitat Company, federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex a bottom-of-the-barrel 11 on a 100-point scale. Another Habitat-mismanaged property called Lawndale Restoration was so run-down that city officials
RobNCIt, I hate to let the air out of your hot air balloon, but Mr. Obama will AGAIN win NC. It's not the President who has "duped" NC, it's the do nothing members of Congress, who have selfishly played politics to prevent the President from making progress with the hope of winning the next election (and NC). Those selfish acts are what turns off the people of NC. Mr. Obama will win NC in part because of the "large influx" of whites to NC that are too independent-minded to conform to the State's past negative Jesse Helms legacy.
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