I am honestly not sure it is possible to unite the country with Trump as President regardless of the congressional leadership. He thrives on division, chaos and anger.
he's not the only one.
until obama, we never really had a president chime in on social issues and take a side. issues obama did that for are:
almost any police shooting = police bad
> ferguson is a great example. hell we got a lot of these examples
beer-gate when he said the police acted stupidly before he even knew details.
trayvon martin
clockboy
you WILL let boys into the girls restroom or you get no $
and i can go on and on.
i fully agree trump is a divisive person. but if you think obama wasn't then you're really into selective blindness.
I think what made Obama seem divisive was thathe spoke out on issues thay matteted to the black community. Issues that were either uncomfortable or invisible to many whites. But his rhetoric was inclusive. Trump not so much. Trying to create and equivalency is in itself a form of blindness.
he spoke about matters important to him and his base.
trump is doing the same.
all the "but this base is better because xyz" or "this base is more moralistic cause we 123" - well that's kinda the cause of the divide isn't it?
obama divides people up, you excuse it cause you're of that mindset to agree with him.
trump divides people up, you damn it cause you're against those people/mindset.
now - how did clockboy matter to the black community? he didn't. he was muslim and ergo, obama wanted to take his side mostly just because of that. clockboy was invited to the whitehouse and obama said "how can people be so stupid" before he ever even saw the clock.
where people pee. this a black community thing?
going after the police? well ok maybe here cause he only did it when a black person was shot. never saw him call out the police for shooting a white, asian, indian or any other person.
divide is divide. justifying it cause you like "part" of it? well that's how we got this divided.
There is more to it than that, but I dont think you would see it.
One is in the language and intent a president uses and whether the president ever moves beyond pandering to his base to governing for the entire country. I also look at the record of demonizing...and the intent behind that demonizing. Despite taking a stand on police violence towards blacks, Obama was careful not to make about all or even most police, he did not demonize them, as was very clear in his moving words after the murder of police officers in Dallas. His DoJ found somereal problems with some police departments, and entered into cooperatove agrrements with to improve policing. Nothing about that should be divisive, yet one of Trumps first actions was to nullify them and then encourage police to bang peoples heads on the cars. I see the public demonizing of muslims, Mexicans and immigrants as far more divisive than which restroom to use inschool.
going back to the harvard professor and the police. before a single fact was known by obama, he said the police "acted stupidly".
Obama made a rookie mistake, recognized it, and did something to fix it. I dont have problem with that, not with any president including Trump. All presidents go through it. The job doesn't come with a manual, and there is a huge gap between what you can say or do as a private citizen and what you
should say or do as the President. The thing is...do they learn from it, strive to make right, or do the keep repeating it?
Obama apologized for his comments by holding a "beer summit" - he at least recognized he was being unfair, speaking from his own personal background, and that as president he had to look at things differently. Has Trump ever done that?
maybe you and i just define things differently but that is making it about the police not able to do their job.
No, I agree it was a bad thing to say, ahead of any facts, but the fact that he realized it, and he was still a rookie mitigate it in my opinion. Everyone makes mistakes.
now please feel free to find some examples of obama taking the side of the police in a police shooting.
i'll wait.
Your questions sparked some interest, so I did a bit of research. Where did this meme that Obama hates law enforcement come from and why does it persist? One article is pretty succinct:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...fficers/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.913d86a3d322
It's impossible not to note that each of these incidents centers in some way on race: Gates, rap music, Black Lives Matter. That Obama has been receptive to the concerns of protesters is clearly amplified by how Obama is himself black and that he has framed some of what police departments need to improve upon in explicitly racial terms. Some small part of the interest in siding with the police in opposition to Obama — if one chooses to look at the two in opposition — is probably motivated by race-based assumptions. More broadly, though, it's Obama's focus on problems in police work that happen to deal with race, which are blended into a sense that he opposes law enforcement broadly.
This brings us to the horror that occurred Thursday night. Walsh was by no means alone in suggesting that the fault lay with Obama — unsurprising given how long Obama has been surrounded by criticisms of his views of law enforcement. With the obvious exception of calling the actions of the police in Cambridge "stupid," though, Obama's comments about police have been positive even as he has called for improvements. That call for improvement is, to many, enough to suggest that the president broadly dislikes all American police officers.
Which seems to say far more about our politics than it does about Obama.
You asked for an example of Obama taking the side of police, when you take his remarks in context, or his speeches in entirety, he has. He has pointed out the issues and he has commended good policing. So my question to you is - why should this be seen as divisive? It really shouldn't - it should be issues that concern all of us. We want our police to be the best, we want good policing. We should support it. That means we should recognize when and where things are going badly and seek to improve it. Do you disagree, should this be "divisive"?
http://time.com/4397600/obama-alton-sterling-philando-castile-speech-transcript/
To be concerned about these issues is not to be against law enforcement. There are times when these incidents occur and you see protests and you see vigils, and I get letters, well-meaning letters sometimes, from law enforcement saying, how come we’re under attack?
How come not as much emphasis is made when police officers are shot? And so to all of law enforcement, I want to be very clear. We know you have a tough job. We mourn those in uniform who are protecting us who lose their lives.
On a regular basis, I have joined with families in front of Capitol Hill to commemorate the incredible heroism that they have displayed. I have hugged family members who have lost loved ones doing the right thing. I know how much it hurts.
On a regular basis, we bring in those who have done heroic work in law enforcement and have survived. Sometimes they have been injured. Sometimes they risked their lives in remarkable ways, and we applaud them and appreciate them, because they are doing a really tough job really well.
There is no contradiction between us supporting law enforcement, making sure they have got the equipment they need, making sure that their collective bargaining rights are recognized, making sure that they are adequately staffed, making sure that they are respected, making sure their families are supported, and also saying that there are problems across our criminal justice system.
show me 1 time, just 1, where obama came out in defense of a white person who was shot by the police. or did he only care when the police shot black kids, or did he feel white people could take care of themselves? these actions alone constitute taking a site, coyote. these actions fan the flames that later resulted in 5 officers shot in dallas by a police hating person.
Maybe, because based on the statistics, the white community doesn't face the grim challenges that the black community does - because race is unlikely to be an issue when the victim is white? Has Trump ever come out in support of a black person killed by police? I don't think so. Instead, he went a whole lot further by encouraging police to bang suspects heads on the cars. Obama spoke out on a deep seated issue in the black community. No white president has addressed this. It has been largely ignored. I guess it's too divisive? Maybe it is. Maybe Obama was divisive. But maybe sometimes it's a good thing.
Read President Obama's Speech From the Dallas Memorial Service
I know that Americans are struggling right now with what we’ve witnessed over the past week. First, the shootings in Minnesota and Baton Rouge, the protests. Then the targeting of police by the shooter here, an act not just of demented violence, but of racial hatred.
All of it has left us wounded and angry and hurt. This is — the deepest faultlines of our democracy have suddenly been exposed, perhaps even widened. And although we know that such divisions are not new, though they’ve surely been worse in even the recent past, that offers us little comfort.
Faced with this violence, we wonder if the divides of race in America can ever be bridged. We wonder if an African American community that feels unfairly targeted by police and police departments that feel unfairly maligned for doing their jobs, can ever understand each other’s experience.
We turn on the TV or surf the internet, and we can watch positions harden and lines drawn and people retreat to their respective corners, and politicians calculate how to grab attention or avoid the fallout. We see all this, and it’s hard not to think sometimes that the center won’t hold and that things might get worse.
I understand. I understand how Americans are feeling. But Dallas, I’m here to say we must reject such despair. I’m here to insist that we are not as divided as we seem. And I know that because I know America. I know how far we’ve come against impossible odds.
for a long time the police were flat out UNDER ATTACK. why do you think people were going out there and shooting the police like they did here in dallas? i'm not about to sit here and defend every police shooting as justified but i'm not about to demonize them all either. many that were held against the police in time and when people looked, were due to the "victim" and not the police. never heard too many retractions there, coyote.
you will never see the divide if you continue to say only the other side is wrong, yours is at worst; misunderstood.
Yes, they were, and nowhere did Obama support it, no where - quite the opposite. Neither were they demonized.
Somewhere, in the midst of this, people ought to be able to see that problems CAN be addressed without demonizing the other, that the extremes aren't the only positions possible in a complex situation. I think that was where Obama was at.
And yes, I liked Obama and yes I agreed with many of his policies, but I don't think that is why I see him as far less divisive. I strongly disagreed with many of Bush's policies - vehemently. But I did not see him as divisive, not like Trump is. Where as Obama might have been divisive (imo, partly because of people's discomfort with the positions he took to support minorities, and people saw that as a threat to the majority status quo) - Trump is all about division. It's all he has. It's the only political game he knows how to play.
That's just my opinion.
