'It’s embarrassing as hell,' Rangel says. Rangel hits Obama on diversity

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) on Thursday called it “embarrassing as hell” that President Barack Obama is facing charges that his White House lacks diversity.

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“It’s embarrassing as hell. We’ve been through all of this with [2012 GOP presidential nominee] Mitt Romney. And we were very hard with Mitt Romney with the women binder and a variety of things,” Rangel said on MSNBC. “And I kind of think there’s no excuse with the second term.”

The Obama administration has been criticized recently for not having enough diversity with its Cabinet appointees after The New York Times ran a photo of Obama meeting with senior advisers in the Oval Office, the vast majority of them white men. The White House responded by releasing its own photo, which showed a much more diverse crowd of Obama’s top advisers.

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“The president values diversity, believes it’s important, because it enhances the quality of the pool of potential nominees for positions across the administration,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said at briefing Tuesday. “He believes that by looking broadly for candidates for offices that [it] ups the chances he’ll find the very best person for the job.”

Rangel said Obama could be suffering from the “Harvard problem.”

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“If it’s the first term, you could see people got to know who is around that’s qualified in order to get this job, No. 1. I had thought, and maybe it’s so, that it could be the Harvard problem where people just know each other, trust each other and women and minorities don’t get a chance to rub elbows and their reputations and experience is not known,” Rangel said.