NY Times:
President Obama did something today that he hardly ever does — and no other president could ever have done. He addressed the racial fault lines in the country by laying bare his personal anguish and experience in an effort to help white Americans understand why African Americans reacted with frustration and anger to the acquittal of George Zimmerman for shooting Trayvon Martin.
OTOH, you have to be awed [yet again] by how exquisitely tone deaf
Jennifer Rubin's analysis is:
President Obama’s extensive remarks in the White House Briefing Room this afternoon were as surprising as they were gratuitous. He had already made one statement asking citizens to respect the George Zimmerman verdict. Today he did so again but offered no specific policy recommendation with regard to race (although he used it as a forum to assail “stand-your-ground” legislation that ultimately was not at issue in the case).
Gratutitous? Only if you are a white person of privilege. Rubin not only missed the "there but for fortune go you and I" part, she missed the profound effect the remarks had on most of the country, including sparking a
racist backlash. PS ask jurist B37 or read instructions to the jury about stand your ground. But then again she's Jennifer Rubin.
Jill Lawrence:
Although his apparently unscripted comments in the White House press briefing room drew scorn and even accusations of racism from some on the right, he was right to try to lay out a constructive, nonpolitical path forward. It would have been a missed opportunity—a huge missed opportunity—if America had not heard firsthand from its first black president at a moment like this.
“Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” Obama said, an arresting start to 19 minutes of reflections unique in the nation’s history.
The 2nd best thing about the speech was that it was unexpected. The best thing about the speech was the speech.
— @DemFromCT
More politics and policy below the fold.
Pretty hard to see how POTUS nominates Ray Kelly to DHS after that speech.
— @chrislhayes
Amy Davidson:
Some commentators asked, afterward, if Obama was putting himself in the middle of a case where he didn’t belong. But his voice does belong in it, as many more voices do. Messages about not belonging have haunted this case from the beginning. When the police found Trayvon Martin’s dead body, they at first accepted not only that he didn’t belong in the neighborhood but that he didn’t belong anywhere, or with anyone; his parents had to come looking for him the next day, after an night of uncertainty, only to be pointed to his body. But he belonged anywhere in America, as the teen-ager he was and the adult he could have been.
Jonathan Capehart:
I was in the briefing room when the president said these words, and I will admit to a welling of the eyes. One of the reasons President Bill Clinton is so popular among blacks is because he spoke to them and about them in ways that were knowing. To have a president who looks like me and has lived the same experience I have and to say so before the nation was as overwhelming as it was historic.
But Obama wasn’t just talking to me or fellow African Americans. He was talking to all Americans.
Krissah Thompson and Lonnae O’Neal Parker:
His tone was flat, but his words conveyed the pain of a shared narrative. And in a case driven by optics — man and boy, hoodies you see and weapons you don’t — the sight of a black man speaking to the interior lives of black men while standing in front of the White House seal as his nation’s standard bearer, made for another powerful visual.
The constant suspicion that dog black men, that many African Americans believe dogged Martin on the night he was shot, were for a moment fully given voice by Obama.
“I just ask people to consider if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk?” the president questioned Socratically. “And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman, who had followed him in a car, because he felt threatened?”
For some, his remarks could have been titled: On being black and male in 21st century America.
Charles M. Blow:
With his statements, the president dispensed with the pedantic and made the tragedy personal.
He spoke of his own experiences with subtle biases, hinting at the psychological violence it does to the spirit — being followed around in stores when shopping, hearing the locking of car doors when you approach, noticing the clutching of purses as you enter an elevator.
It is in these subtleties that black folks are forever forced to box with shadows, forever forced to recognize their otherness and their inability to simply blend.
In “The Souls of Black Folk,” W. E. B. Du Bois described this phenomenon thusly:
“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
Via NRO,
Charles Krauthammer, long missing from the pundit round-up, still gets paid for this stuff:
Appearing on Fox News’ Special Report this evening, Charles Krauthammer expressed disappointment with the president’s surprise address this afternoon on the acquittal of George Zimmerman, calling it “a political speech addressed to his constituency on the left, which I thought was unfortunate . . . Look, I gave him and Holder credit all week for trying to de-racialize the issue. And what Obama did, I think, unfortunately, today is to reracialize it.”
In other news,
Dana Milbank:
Liz Cheney’s Senate candidacy gives me hope.
I’m not hopeful because I’d like the former vice president’s daughter to become a senator, though my job would surely be more entertaining if she were to dislodge the unexciting incumbent, Sen. Mike Enzi, in Wyoming’s Republican primary.
What fills me with hope is the instant denunciation of her run — by conservative Republicans.
Our Wyoming poll is finding people think Liz Cheney should run in Virginia instead of Wyoming
— @ppppolls