President Obama suggests GOP would ‘get fired’ for shutdown, making comparisons to worker strikes
Described as a gaffe by conservative critics, President Obama spoke to a Maryland crowd Thursday about the shutdown, comparing the GOP to workers refusing to show up for work until their demands were met.
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President Obama was drawing an analogy to the Republicans’ current refusal to reopen the government they shut down, and told the crowd this:
“If you’re working here and in the middle of the day you just stopped and said, ‘You know what? I want to get something, but I don’t know – I don’t know exactly what I’m going to get, but I’m just going to stop working until I get something,’” Obama began. “And I’m going to shut down the whole plant until I get something…”
“You’re fired,” an audience member volunteered.
“You’d get fired,” Obama agreed. “Right?”
“Because the deal is you’ve already gotten hired,” the president continued. “You’ve got a job. You’re getting a paycheck. And, so, you also are getting the pride of doing a good job, and contributing to a business, and looking out for your fellow workers. That’s what you’re getting.”
“It shouldn’t be any different for a member of Congress,” Obama concluded.
Fox News commentator Brit Hume tweeted:
What does he think a strike is? Obama: If a worker shut down a manufacturing plant until they got what they wanted, they’d be fired.
The President didn’t address the House funding bills for certain agencies stalling in Congress as he continued: “What you get is our intelligence professionals being back on the job. What you get is our medical researchers back on the job. What you get are little kids back in the Head Start. What you get are our national parks and monuments open again. What you get is the economy not stalling, but continuing to grow. What you get are workers continuing to be hired. That’s what you get.”
