November 30, 2007
Chris Rock on Bush: "White people burning, he was there. Black people drowning, he don't care… He was putting out the (CA) fires with Katrina water."
NEW YORK, NY -- At the Apollo in Harlem on Thursday, some of the most memorable lines of the evening were not delivered by the historic theater's headliner Barack Obama, who was here for a campaign fundraiser.
Instead, it was comedian and actor, Chris Rock, who had the crowd cheering and roaring with laughter with his introduction of Obama.
In urging the audience to support Obama, Rock teased the crowd, "Progressive people want to be on the right side of history because you'd be real embarrassed if he won and you weren't down with him ... I can't call him now I was with that white lady what was I thinking?"
Rock went on to belittle President Bush and compared the way the federal government handled its response to the wild fires in California to the emergency response in Katrina.
"This is how [Bush] dealt with catastrophe. The fires in LA he was there the next day," Rock said. "White people burning he was there. Black people drowning he don't care… He was putting out the fires with Katrina water!"
The crowd went crazy, and when Obama took the stage he joked that it wasn't always a good thing to follow the likes of not only Chris Rock but also academic Cornell West who had previously spoken. The only other well known VIP to attend the event was rapper Q-Tip, who never took the stage, reports NBC/NJ's Aswini Anburajan.
Speaking for about half an hour, Obama stuck to a speech that he has delivered before in South Carolina on why he's running for office with a new kind of politics. He didn't attack his fellow Democrats.
However, he did get a lot of laughs, when he told the crowd that he wasn't running because of some "long-held ambition" or because he felt "it was owed to him."
The crowd at the fundraiser held at the Apollo was racially diverse and unusually attentive. The normally raucous theater had near pin drop silence at times as Obama spoke, a stark contrast to the loud cheering that can often drown at his voice at large gatherings.
The event at the Apollo and Obama's earlier photo op with Al Sharpton appeared to project the candidate as one who is at home with Black America.
More after the jump, however, from a Harlem truck driver who said HRC has his vote.
But Herbert Matthews a 48-year-old Harlem truck driver, showed that Obama has an uphill battle at least in New York.
"Obama we ain't never seen him out here. For him to come out because it's primary time and he needs the votes… we need someone who supports the community," Mattews said.
Matthews praised former President Bill Clinton and acknowledged that his support for Hillary Clinton stemmed more from his appreciation of her husband than it did from anything she had done.
"Hillary I mean you know she's never been out here to walk the streets like her husband," Matthews said, pointing out where President Clinton's office was, on 125th street and Adam Clayton Powell Drive.
Posted at 08:26 AM
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