http://nypost.com/2015/05/02/obama-shrinking-from-responsibility/Obama shrinking from responsibility
By Michael Goodwin
May 2, 2015 | 11:46pm
If ever America needed a president who could speak to and for all the people, this would be such a moment. If only we had such a president.
Wherever you look, whatever the topic, the Founders’ spirit of American exceptionalism is sputtering. Our national catechism, that tomorrow definitely will be better than today, is suffering a serious bout of the yips.
Times like these are why we have a president. Times like these are why Barack Obama became president.
Despite his foolish boast that his ascendancy would mark the moment when “the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,” Obama genuinely inspired enough hope in enough people to earn the job.
But those gauzy days of swelling crowds and swooning students now appear to be a passing derangement. Even reasonable optimism has been shattered like so many storefront windows in Baltimore, Ferguson and other hope-forsaken places.
More troubling and more dangerous, the man who promised to redeem us is not just failing to rise to the occasion. He is shrinking as the challenges grow.
Now that the Freddie Gray case is moving to the criminal-justice system, it is worth recalling Obama’s unhelpful contribution while the violence still raged in the streets. His Tuesday comments, while occasionally forceful, were dominated by finger-pointing and a personal malaise that bordered on self-pity.
He found fault with riotous thugs, the media, Congress, the police and the entire social system, leaving only himself beyond reproach.
It has been obvious for some time that the president’s leadership tank is out of gas. Now, in the extra-troubled seventh year of a failed presidency, he’s given up on America. Apparently, we the people have disappointed him one too many times.
In a typically peevish passage of his 15-minute speech, he declared that fatal confrontations between black men and police were “a slow-rolling crisis” that “has been going on for a long time.”
“This is not new,” he said, “and we shouldn’t pretend that it’s new.”
Factually speaking, he is correct. Police confrontations with black men are not new, nor are the riots that grow out of them. A study showed that virtually every “race riot” in modern times was sparked by such incidents.
Some cases were instances of police brutality, while others, like Ferguson, were found to be a legitimate use of deadly force, though the president didn’t bother to draw such distinctions.
No matter, for his broad-brush condemnation inadvertently indicted his own tenure. Improved race relations would be one of the benefits of his historic election. Things were supposed to change because of him.
Even among those who didn’t support him, it did not seem a stretch to believe that at least race riots would fade into oblivion when an African-American was sitting in the Oval Office.
But, in fact, polls show that blacks and whites generally agree that racial tensions are worse now than they were before Obama took office. And that was true even before Baltimore burned.
Naturally, Obama didn’t mention that part of his record, but his obvious lack of confidence that anything would change during the remainder of his watch was nonetheless striking.
“If we really want to solve the problem, if our society really wanted to solve the problem, we could,” he said. “It’s just it would require everybody saying, ‘This is important, this is significant,’ and that we don’t just pay attention to these communities when a CVS burns, and we don’t just pay attention when a young man gets shot or has his spine snapped.”
His concept of paying “attention” involves what he called “massive investments in urban communities,” which means more of the same liberal programs that haven’t much helped a multi-generation black underclass in Baltimore and other ghettos. Nor has Baltimore’s Democratic Party monopoly, a black mayor and a black police chief curbed the crime epidemic that makes “Charm City” one of the most violent in America, with the fifth-highest murder rate.
Against those facts and bereft of hope for change, the president who promised a different tone was reduced to scolding anybody and everybody. “I think there are police departments that have to do some soul searching,” he said. “I think there’s some communities that have to do some soul searching. But I think we as a country have to do some soul searching.”
Clearly, he assumes our soul searching would lead us to see things his way. But if he would actually do some soul searching himself, well, that would be real reason for hope.
