The Arc's statement pertaining to President Obama

By now, everyone's aware of President Obama's inappropriate joke from last week's appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. The following is the statement issued by The Arc in the Monday Morning Memo, which features news of interest for members of The Arc and their families.

Obama Gaffe Makes the News, Town Hall Meeting Statement was Largely Missed
Late last week and over the weekend we witnessed an explosion in news coverage of President Obama's unfortunate joking comment about bowling "like Special Olympics." While that coverage is justified, it has been relatively limited in terms of any serious exploration of the current day challenges facing people with disabilities and their families -- an opportunity missed. The superficial news coverage of the gaffe also missed out on an opportunity to call attention to the President's expressed commitment to an aggressive disability policy agenda (see http://www.whitehouse.gov/agenda/disabilities/) which he had reaffirmed at a Town Hall meeting the previous day. In case you haven't seen it, the following is the question asked by one of the Town Hall participants and the President's response:

QUESTION:

I’m Gary Carr, and Mr. President, thank God for you. (Applause.) Sir, my question regards the true renaissance that’s happening with people with disabilities. They are an emerging population — millions of people with more potential in capacity, more mobile, more educated, more healthy, more empowered technology, but still trapped in very, very old social models that see them in terms of tragedy and charity and need and care. And the modern population of people with disabilities simply does not fit that model.

And as your plan succeeds and you generate these jobs, and as baby boomers retire, we’re going to need every single person of capacity to work that we can. And that must include many, many, many thousands, if not millions, of people with disabilities. (Applause.)

So — I see you nodding your head, so my first question is, do you subscribe to what I’m saying, and next of all, can you talk about how your disability agenda will release this emerging potential that’s currently wasted and untapped?

THE PRESIDENT:

Well, you are exactly right, that we need everybody. And every program that we have has to be thinking on the front end, how do we make sure that it is inclusive, and building into it our ability to draw on the capacities of persons with disabilities.

That’s true on the education front, where our recovery package increases funding for children with disabilities. It is true in terms of how Hilda Solis, our Secretary of Labor, will be thinking about our training programs, to make sure that we are not excluding from training for high-tech jobs, the new jobs of the future, persons with disability.

It means enforcing the ADA and fighting back on some court opinions that have tried to narrow in ways that I think are inappropriate the original intent of that legislation.

So one of the things that I think is important is to make sure, as you pointed out, that we don’t see this as an afterthought, a segregated program, but we are infusing every department, every agency, every act that we take with a mindfulness about the importance of persons with disabilities, their skills, their talents, their capacity.

That I think is the approach that my administration is going to take, and we hope that by taking that approach that attitude will infuse state and local governments that are also receiving federal money. Okay?