It must be that he just can’t help himself. It must be that he assumes that anything he chooses to say is precisely what is called for. It must be that there isn’t a single person in his employ who will raise a hand and say, “Mr. President, perhaps something different today.”
How else to explain President Obama’s remarks following the murder of three police officers in Baton Rouge on Sunday? As he did in Dallas last week, the president began on the right note, talking of the dangers police officers face and pledging federal support for the investigation. “And we as a nation,” he said, “have to be loud and clear that nothing justifies violence against law enforcement. Attacks on police are an attack on all of us and the rule of law that makes society possible.”
And just like in Dallas, if only he had left it there. But no, once again he yielded to that irresistible impulse to insert himself into the conversation. “Five days ago,” he said, “I traveled to Dallas for the memorial service of the officers who were slain there. I said that that killer would not be the last person who tries to make us turn on each other. Nor will today’s killer.”
It was no great feat of prognostication to predict Sunday’s murders, or the ones still to come. At the time the president spoke, little was known about the crime but its grim statistics. “As of right now,” he said, “we don’t know the motive of the killer.” But we do now. Gavin Long was a black separatist and former member of the Nation of Islam. “I love being the buffer between the bully and the little guy,” he said on a video posted to YouTube on July 12. “I love fighting the righteous fight.” Which is apparently what he believed he was doing when he opened fire on those police officers.
And how could he believe such a thing? Because he had ingested the steady diet of anti-police agitprop that for two years has been peddled by the Black Lives Matter movement and endorsed in the media, on college campuses, and among the more unscrupulous politicians, including the one in the White House. And just like the murderer in Dallas, Michah Johnson, Long is even now being hailed as a hero in some of the more noxious corners of the Internet.
On Sunday, the president spoke as he often does of healing divisions within the country. When he speaks in these terms and under these circumstances, his words ring hollow. He presents a false compromise between what he portrays as two extremes while he, the Wise One, occupies the sensible middle ground. But for the vast majority of Americans, whatever their race, there can be no compromise with people who laud murderers as heroes. For such people, there can only be repudiation, something the president cannot bring himself to do.