Politics

Obama Calls for Unity at Prayer Breakfast

No.

|

President Barack Obama urged made a plea for lawmakers to resist partisan squabbles on Thursday at the National Prayer Breakfast, one of Washington's rare displays of bipartisan comity.

"I do worry sometimes that as soon as we leave the prayer breakfast, everything we've been talking about the whole time at the prayer breakfast seems to be forgotten, on the same day of the prayer breakfast," Obama said, as the audience chuckled with him. "You'd like to think that—that the shelf life wasn't so short."

Noting that this was his fifth prayer breakfast since becoming president, Obama said he often goes back to the Oval Office after the event and "start[s] watching the cable news networks"—an unusual admission for a president who frequently says he ignores the 24/7 TV news cycle—"and it's like we didn't pray."