Former US president Barack Obama is taking on an increasingly public role as the nation confronts a confluence of historic crises that has exposed deep racial and socioeconomic inequalities in the US, and reshaped the November election.
In doing so, Obama is signaling a willingness to sharply critique his successor, US President Donald Trump, and fill what many Democrats see as a national leadership void.
On Wednesday, he held a virtual town hall event with young people to discuss policing and the civil unrest that has followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Photo: AFP / The Obama Foundation
Obama rejected a debate he said he had seen come up in “a little bit of chatter on the Internet” about “voting versus protests, politics and participation versus civil disobedience and direct action.”
“This is not an either-or. This is a both and to bring about real change,” he said during the town hall hosted by his foundation’s My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, which supports young men of color. “We both have to highlight a problem and make people in power uncomfortable, but we also have to translate that into practical solutions and laws that could be implemented and monitored and make sure we’re following up on.”
Obama called for turning the protests over Floyd’s death into policy change to ensure safer policing, and increased trust between communities and law enforcement.
He urged “every mayor in the country to review your use of force policies” with their communities and “commit to report on planned reforms” before prioritizing their implementation.
During the roundtable, Obama drew parallels between the unrest sweeping the US and protest movements of the 1960s.
However, he said polls show a majority of Americans supporting today’s protesters and forming a “broad coalition” in a way much of the country did not back then — despite some of the protests “having been marred by the actions of a tiny minority that engaged in violence.”
Still, “at some point, attention moves away” and “protests dwindle in size” so “it’s important to take that moment that’s been created as a society, as a country, and say let’s use this to finally have an impact,” he said.
Obama was already beginning to emerge from political hibernation to endorse former US vice president Joe Biden’s Democratic presidential bid when the coronavirus pandemic swept across the US, killing more than 107,000 people, and the economy began to crater.
The crises scrambled the Biden campaign’s plans for how to begin deploying Obama as their chief surrogate ahead of the November election, but also gave the former president a clear opening to start publicly arguing what he has signaled to friends and associates privately for the past three years: that he does not believe Trump is up for the job.
Obama grappled with police brutality against minorities as president, including in Ferguson, Missouri, where clashes broke out after the death of Michael Brown, a black 18-year-old.
After Brown’s death, the US Department of Justice under Obama moved to enact broad policing reforms, though most were halted under the Trump administration.
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