8:10 AM
Pat Brady, Chairman of the Illinois Republican Party made the statement after the State of the Union Address:
"After his agenda took a stunning defeat in Massachusetts, President Barack Obama claims he finally gets the message and has opted to join the American people in their anger. What he fails to understand is that the frustration stems directly from the leftward agenda he has tried to push through Congress despite the overwhelming protests of voters. They’re furious because the Obama Administration promised that his so-called $787 billion economic stimulus experiment would keep employment under eight percent, but today the national unemployment rate is ten percent and Illinois has lost over 193,000 jobs since Obama took office. They’re irate because rather than focusing on getting America back to work, his Administration has consistently tried to use the economic crisis as a means to pass his expensive liberal agenda of government-run health care and unsustainable budgets."
"It is clear that the President and his Democratic allies are playing politics, hoping that voters will have forgotten the billions of dollars that have been spent over the past year without any form of accountability. But personality is not enough to convince voters when the policies coming from this White House are so obviously flawed. But we have already seen that President Obama has no coattails in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts; three states that the President won in the fall of 2008. Illinois is next. If Democrats like Melissa Bean, Debbie Halvorson, Bill Foster, and Phil Hare continue to embrace his big-government agenda then they will soon find themselves into a forced retirement."