President Barack Obama's harsh partisan tone during a fundraising trip this week in Texas was "dumbfounding," and he should drop the rhetoric and find a way to work with Republicans, talk show host Joe Scarborough told MSNBC's "Morning Joe."
"It’s lonely just me doing stuff. I’d love if Republicans did stuff, too," Obama said at a speech in Austin, Texas, while also mocking Republican threats to impeach or sue him, the
International Business Times reported.
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"This is dumbfounding," Scarborough, a former Republican Florida congressman, said Friday. "That speech by the president of the United States would have been fantastic had it been in 2008 or 2012. We're in 2014. And, maybe it's campaigning, but it's depressing as an American."
Scarborough questioned how coarse partisan rhetoric would "move both sides together" to find solutions to the nation's problems.
"What good does giving this sort of speech do for the president? What good does it do for Washington? Most importantly, what good does it do for Americans who want Washington to work over the next two and a half years?" he asked.
Obama needed to "drop the self-pity," since his wasn't "the first White House to ever be attacked like this," Scarborough said. When he was in Congress in the 1990s, Scarborough said lawmakers "were harsher on [former President] Bill Clinton in our tone and our rhetoric and the actions we took in the Government Reform and Oversight Committee."
"This is not the first president of the United States who has had an opposition that has tried to finish him off politically from the very beginning," Scarborough said. "At some point, it's time for everybody to roll up their sleeves and grow up, stop feeling sorry for themselves and get to work."
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