Charleston Shootings Undercut Hope Obama Brought for Better Race Relations

Hope and change came and went.

The country's most polarizing president fails in his long-forgotten pledge to unify the country against racial division.

It's a failed presidency. Obama's going down as one of the worst ever. Particularly sad to see him push the tired gun control narrative before the last rites were read for the dead. But that's the scope of things with the far-left Democrat Party these days. Political and moral bankruptcy, with the president barely able to phone it in before he leaves office in 2017.

At the New York Times:

"Let me be clear, these mass shootings don't occur in other countries," says some deranged fever swamp leftist troll. Oh wait! #Charleston

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) June 18, 2015

WASHINGTON — The shooting massacre of a black pastor and his parishioners at a South Carolina church on Wednesday night once again confronted President Obama with a moment of racial turmoil in a country that for all its progress has yet to completely shed the burden of hatred and division.

After a series of police shootings, protests and riots, this latest eruption of violence reflected a country on edge and a president struggling to pull the American people together. Any hopes of what supporters once called a “post-racial” era now seem fanciful as Mr. Obama’s second term increasingly focuses on what he termed “the darker part of our history.”

In a pattern that has become achingly familiar to him and the nation, Mr. Obama on Thursday strode down to the White House briefing room to issue a statement of mourning and grief as he called on the country to unify in the face of tragedy. This time, though, the ritual was made all the more poignant because Mr. Obama personally knew the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, the pastor slain at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., as well as other members of the congregation.

“This is not the first time that black churches have been attacked and we know that hatred across races and faiths pose a particular threat to our democracy and our ideals,” Mr. Obama told a national television audience. “The good news is I am confident that the outpouring of unity and strength and fellowship and love across Charleston today from all races, from all faiths, from all places of worship indicates the degree to which those old vestiges of hatred can be overcome.”

If those words of optimism were belied by his own grim face and subdued tone, perhaps it reflected a certain weariness or frustration over the limits of his ability to change the nation he leads. While his own election nearly seven years ago once seemed to harken a new era in race relations, the events of the last couple years especially seem to continually mock that hope.

The racially charged killing of Trayvon Martin, the fatal encounters with police in places like Ferguson, Mo., Staten Island and North Charleston, S.C., and the upheaval in Baltimore have all served to put the nation’s unfinished business back on the agenda. By virtue of his own background, Mr. Obama has addressed them with a personal perspective none of his predecessors in the White House ever could. And yet easy solutions elude him just as they did them.

“Part of what I take from this is on the one hand the realization that this struggle still continues and despite profound change there is still profound hatred,” said Lonnie Bunch, the founding director of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, set to open in Washington next year. “It is a fundamentally different country. It’s a country that has changed in ways that are amazing. But it is still a country that is still torn apart by race.”

Such a realization occurs at a moment when the president who responds with words of comfort and the attorney general who announces a vigorous joint investigation are both African-Americans.
Mr. Obama has spent much of the last couple years addressing race in a more expansive way than he did in his first term, because of stark events as well as because of the anniversaries of iconic moments in the civil rights movement. He has started an initiative called My Brother’s Keeper to help young Latino and African-American men, and he indicated that effort will be one of his primary missions after leaving office.

In the meantime, it seems likely that issues of race and violence will shape the conversation for the rest of Mr. Obama’s tenure as well as during the campaign to succeed him. Many of those aspiring to Mr. Obama’s job have been wrestling with how to address the nation’s persistent divide, and they weighed in about the latest violence with statements of grief and outrage...

Ed Morrissey has more, at Hot Air, "Obama: This kind of violence doesn’t happen elsewhere, you know."