but let me stop you for a second, when you talk about the nanny state david, let me finish. david, let me finish. the investigation has just begun so i m not going to reach a conclusion about what we may find. but what we do know happened is they were targeting tea party groups. we know that. nbc s peter alexander is live for us at the white house with a decidedly less testy tone. thank you for joining us on this sunday. let s talk about the administration. how are they respond together accusations and how is the president trying to change the conversation? the white house, as you noted, the president is at the morehouse college, giving a commencement address there at the historically black college. as for these simultaneous scandals or convergence of controversies you ve been talking about, the white house insists its primary goal now has been to try to take these things out of the political realm, out of the realm of partisan ship.
growing up, a father who had been more involved so that every day he tries to overcome that by setting a good example within his own family and being an exemplary father to his two daughters and to his wife michelle. a very, very powerful and practical message for these young money to take away with them for the rest of their lives. with a welcome to the both of you, jimmy, first off your thoughts to the president s speech. and this historic setting, people should be reminded martin luther king, jr. graduated from here. there was such history outlined at the top of the commencement speech when the president was introduced, all these important dates as well. the president went there. he did go personal and talked about his father and said to a group of 500 young, african-american men, here s the deal, you have to pony up and you have to go out there and kick it out of the park, unlike
my father, unlike his father. that was pretty father. i got goose bumps a couple of times. listen, it was better than the commencement speech i had, i can tell you that for sure. this one is going to be ranking up there i think always. but something that struck me, jimmy, as well, the president s message overall on the middle class, providing a fair chance for everyone in this country, that is the message he ran on as president. it s something that s obviously very close to his heart. how much of that can he accomplish now with these ongoing controversies? it s going to be hard for him. this last week, these last two weeks have not been good weeks for the president. and they brought some of that upon themselves, at least the administration has and some of them they haven t. the benghazi thing, for example, i think is somewhat of a farce. it going to be very hard for them to get an agenda done at this point. let me be clear, i support congress s ability to investigate the executive
an uncle or a parent who has told you at some point in life as an african-american you have to work twice as hard as anyone else if you want to get by. i think president mays put it even better. he said whatever you do strive to do it so well that no man living and no man dead and no man yet to be born can do it any better. and i promise you what was needed in dr. mays time, that spirit of excellence, hard work, dedication and no excuses is needed more than ever. if you think you can get over in this economy just because you have a morehouse degree, you have a rude awakening. if you keep hungry, keep hustling, keep on your grind and get other folks to do the same,
but dr. wilson told me you all had a choice and decided to do it out here anyway. that s a morehouse man talking. now think about it, for a black man in the 40s and the 50s, the threat of violence, the constant humiliations large and small, the uncertainty that you could support a family, the gnawing doubts born of a jim crow culture that told you every day that somehow you were inferior, the temptation to shrink from the world, to accept your place, to avoid risks, to be afraid, that temptation was necessarily strong. and yet here under the tutelage of men like dr. mays, young martin learned to be unafraid and he in turn taught others to be unafraid, and over time he