Someone better recommend a treatment for the appeasement bug that’s been going around congress. This time, it’s the Congressional Black Caucus, who’ve decided to throw Black America under the bus to accommodate President Obama’s centrist agenda, while at the same time complaining that Obama’s latest bus tour hasn’t made its way enough into black communities. From The Washington Examiner by way of Commentary Magazine:

“We don’t put pressure on the president,” Maxine Waters [of the Congressional Black Caucus] told the audience at Wayne County Community College.  “Let me tell you why. We don’t put pressure on the president because ya’ll love the president. You love the president. You’re very proud to have a black man — first time in the history of the United States of America. If we go after the president too hard, you’re going after us.”

[…]

“The Congressional Black Caucus loves the president too,” Waters said.  “We’re supportive of the president, but we’re getting tired, ya’ll.  We’re getting tired. And so, what we want to do is, we want to give the president every opportunity to show what he can do and what he’s prepared to lead on. We want to give him every opportunity, but our people are hurting. The unemployment is unconscionable. We don’t know what the strategy is. We don’t know why on this trip that he’s in the United States now, he’s not in any black community.  We don’t know that.”

A delicate quandary for the CBC: Do they put more pressure on Obama for his consistent failure to face the black community, or do they continue to give him a pass and abandon their own mission of supporting the black community?

Unemployment has been a problem for a while, but the only major legislation that Obama’s signed off on has focused on reducing government spending and extending tax cuts for the wealthy, both of which have made things worse. Sure you can blame it on Republican obstructionism, but at a certain point the fault goes to politicians who don’t stay true to their principles.

The CBC needs to stick to their agenda – not Obama’s – if they want to get anything done that’s going to be beneficial for the black community and other minority groups. Deferring to Obama to lead the fight for liberal and progressive causes has habitually failed to produce sufficient results and usually ends in watered-down compromise. There’s no reason we should expect anything different here.