Barack Obama is no longer president, so I guess there’s no reason to expect him to be “presidential,” but how about thoughtful?
Obama logged on Twitter Tuesday to dump kerosene on the multiple racial bonfires taking place in Minnesota right now, posting a statement that referred to the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin and the “heart-wrenching murder of George Floyd.”
The express purpose of the trial is, in part, to determine whether Floyd was murdered, and the jury is no doubt nervous that an acquittal will inevitably ignite more widespread rioting and violence as seen all throughout 2020 and again this week, following the shooting death of Daunte Wright.
In what world would it be helpful for a former president, our first black one, to call the defendant in the Chauvin trial a murderer before jury deliberation has even begun?
That former president is a constitutional lawyer, heralded by the media as an “intellectual,” who knows exactly what’s at stake here.
But Obama doesn’t seem so much as a former president as a current activist advancing the cause of social justice. And under social justice, due process is an obstacle, not an entitlement.
It’s not as if Obama isn’t an expert in rubbing the sore on controversies that the media have spun into race wars. After the 2013 shooting death of black Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, Obama held a press conference to declare that it was a personal matter. “You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son,” he said. “Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.”
Barely a year into office, Obama dove into a local news story out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, to say that police “acted stupidly” in detaining a black Harvard University professor who had been suspected of breaking into a home. Even admitting, “I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that,” Obama still thought he should thrust himself into that one.
Obama is a race instigator now, just as he was then.
