Van Jones: Obama should do ‘poverty tour’ before paid speeches

Van Jones has a suggestion for how to minimize Barack Obama's backlash for his paid speeches: a "poverty tour."

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CNN’s Van Jones thinks that it’s ridiculous to hold Obama to a different standard when it comes to giving high-paid speeches, but he does have a suggestion for how to minimize the backlash for those speeches: a “poverty tour.”

After Obama received criticism for giving speeches that netted him hundreds of thousands of dollars for each of his appearances, Jones said that it was not fair that Obama should be held to a “second standard” when every other recent president had done the same after leaving office, noting that Obama “should not be the first president to have to be broke.”

However, Jones noted that “we need a Bobby Kennedy in this country,” and to that end, he suggested that Obama “do a tour, go to Appalachia, go to native American reservations where they are shoving these pipelines down their throats and they don’t even have clean water, go to South Central, go to the Arizona border, where you have a lot of poverty.”

“If [Obama] would do a poverty tour first, from a moral point of view, it would be great for him to do,” Jones said on Sunday.

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