Obama returns from Europe to a nation on edge

Instead, he is cutting his trip to Europe short to return to a country torn apart by horrifying violence, partisan divisions and an escalation of racial clashes that have become all too familiar in recent years.

The fallout from the twin police shootings of black men Philando Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Louisiana has fueled the Black Lives Matter movement and led to protests against police brutality across the nation.

At the same time, the murder of five police officers by a shooter who told a police negotiator he wanted to “kill white people, especially white officers” is stoking the Black Lives Matter backlash.

Obama returns to families grieving and a nation on edge, struggling to make sense of it all while still trying to recover from the terrorist attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando and prepare for political conventions later this month that will further divide the country into red and blue.

Is the melting pot that America has long boasted about boiling over?

Few could have predicted that such violent racial confrontations would mar the final years of America’s first black president.

But after all of Obama’s calls for national soul-searching and a recommitment to helping impoverished black communities, there have been few tangible results, and the president’s policing task forces have done little to heal the nation’s open racial wounds.

Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a renowned leader in the civil rights fight of the 1960s, Friday once again called on the nation to deal with racism head-on.

“Sometimes I want to believe we have made real progress … then I think sometimes we’re sliding back,” he said. “We cannot sweep it under the rug in some dark corner. We have to deal with it.”

Since the slaying of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman in Florida in 2012, a string of deadly clashes between police and black men have continued, spurring community outrage and violence throughout the country.

After Michael Brown’s killing by a police officer in Ferguson and the weeks of violence, rioting and protests that erupted there, Obama appointed an 11-person task force to make recommendations on 21st Century Policing policies to build trust between law enforcement and black and minority communities around the country.

In the wake of the Dallas shootings, it’s difficult to discern if that task force shifted the dynamic in any direction — at least when it comes to the nation’s divisions or preventing further deadly police shootings and the high rate of crimes in inner-city black communities that police must confront.

Since the task force’s creation, Freddie Gray mysteriously died from spinal injuries while under police custody in Baltimore, Walter Scott was shot five times in the back by police in South Carolina and Eric Garner, whom police confronted for allegedly selling cigarettes in New York City, died in a police chokehold.

Last year, after Baltimore erupted in violent riots over Gray’s death, National Urban League President Marc Morial said a “state of emergency” was needed to address the deep anger in the black community and its lack of faith in the local and national political systems to adequately respond.

“It’s imperative that we address the outrage that fuels the unrest and heal the rift between police and communities they serve,” he said.

While certain communities have stood out for the community policing efforts, the outrage in others has simmered under the surface seemingly unaddressed.

After the Dallas police slayings, some GOP critics have lashed out at Obama, blaming him for instigating the shootings with his statement after the Castile and Sterling deaths arguing that “racial disparities” in law enforcement played a role.

Waking up to the police murders in Poland Friday, Obama issued another statement saying there is no justification for such a “vicious, calculated and despicable attack on law enforcement.”

Once again, he called on America to come together as a country to address gun violence, which he blamed in part for the attack. Critics quickly seized on the statement, arguing that Obama was once again politicizing an issue not easily solvable by gun control.

The sniper was a 25-year-old Army veteran trained in firearms with no criminal record, so stricter background checks wouldn’t have stopped him from purchasing the weapon.

Early in his presidency, Obama appeared penned in by the racial clashes, worried that if he waded in too deep he would prejudice the legal outcome of cases and stoke more division.

Recently, he has grown more forceful in his statements, urging the nation to confront the “racial disparities” in the criminal justice system that he believes are at the heart of the problem.

But his prescriptions — criminal justice reform, gun control, investment in inner-city communities and body cameras — so far have hit roadblocks in Congress amid a nation deeply divided over whether they would have a real impact on such deep-seated problems.

Confronted by gridlock, Obama has simply blamed Congress for inaction and hasn’t been able to harness the power of the bully pulpit to bring the nation together, sway public opinion, and get Congress to begin to tackle the problem step-by-step through bipartisan solutions such as body cameras and criminal justice reform.

While gun control measures remain at an impasse in Congress, the White House and Congress have gotten traction on criminal justice reform measures, uniting such political foes as conservative firebrand Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Democratic Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J. The push, however, has faltered in recent weeks.

The White House on Friday seemed to seize on a glimmer of hope in in a powerful floor speech Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., made after the Dallas police ambush, acknowledging that all of America would like to see less gun violence. Ryan warned against letting the tragedy “harden our divisions.”

“There’s going to be a temptation to let our anger send us further into our corners,” he said. “Let’s not let that happen. That script is just too easy to write — it’s too predictable. Let’s defy those predictions.”

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Ryan struck the “right tone” in focusing on the values that unite the country, instead of divide it. He then appeared to re-dedicate the president to expending the political capital at the end of his presidency to make another push to tackle the problem.

“The usual retreating to our partisan corners is a significant obstacle to our ability to solve the problem,” he said, referring to the bipartisan effort to push criminal justice reform through Congress.

“We haven’t been able to get [it] over the hump yet,” Earnest said. ” But if we can resist the urge to resort to that political rhetoric, and focus, as Speaker Ryan did today, on the values that unite us, we’re going to be much more likely to succeed in developing policy solutions that will have a tangible impact on these challenges.”

Earnest did not set expectations high, however, noting that the president is “realistic about this” – that “these are not the kinds of problems that are likely to be entirely solved in his lifetime or even his children’s lifetime, but there surely is progress that can be made.”

The deaths in Dallas, Minnesota and Louisiana, he said, have “aroused” the consciences of people of good faith that “these problems that are difficult to solve, and in some cases, easy to ignore, are worth prioritizing.”

“We need to make them a priority in our country,” he said. “And the president is certainly determined to continue to try to find common ground, and to try to build the kinds of bridges that will make a solution to some of these challenges more likely.”