Rep. Lewis: African-Americans frustrated with unemployment rate, not Obama

African-Americans aren’t frustrated with President Obama, they are frustrated with the high unemployment rate, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) said. 

“I don’t think the people that I’ve been talking to today, and there’s several thousand individuals here,” Lewis said from a job fair in Atlanta. “They’re not frustrated with President Obama, they’re frustrated with unemployment. They want all of us to work together, to create jobs and put people back to work.”

{mosads}Lewis’s comments to MSNBC come a few days after Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) said the black community was supportive of Obama but are also “getting tired.”

“We’re supportive of the president, but we getting tired, y’all. Getting tired,” Waters said Tuesday in Detroit at a Congressional Black Caucus town hall. “And so what we want to do is we want to give the president every opportunity to show, 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.”

Waters also questioned why President Obama did not visit any black communities on his Midwest bus tour earlier this week.

Obama is set to unveil a new jobs plan in September, when Congress returns.

Lewis said that the high unemployment rate has hit the black community especially hard. 

“It’s affected greatly the African-American community,” Lewis said.