Leading up to yesterday’s memorial service, the New York Times declared that President Obama “Seeks to Console Dallas and Reassure the Nation.”
He did neither. With few exceptions, Obama turned what had been an emotional tribute to five dead police officers into a rambling lecture on race relations leavened with biblical quotations and political platitudes.
He spoke too long, nearly 40 minutes, and said too little that wasn’t shopworn and predictable. It was neither the time nor the place for the speech he gave.
This was no mere missed opportunity. This was a failure of presidential leadership, and a serious misreading of the mood in Dallas and America. Especially for the dead officers’ families; the last thing they needed was a president more interested in pushing his agenda than in consoling their grief.
Shame on him.
As for reassuring the nation, not a chance. America is in trouble, bleeding confidence in its values, institutions and leaders. And as Obama demonstrated, he has no answers.
Reality long ago outstripped his rhetoric.
The president is not alone. Taken as a whole, the political class is part of the problem. Make that a big part of the problem, which is why much of the nation is looking for outsiders to fix the mess the insiders made.
Donald Trump’s rise is one example of the national mood, but an even more convincing expression of attitude and solutions is coming from police leaders.
Officials such as David Brown in Dallas, David Clarke in Milwaukee and Bill Bratton in New York, among others, are sources of wisdom, courage and common sense.
As the pols prattle on like nattering nabobs, police leaders are responding to the emergency. They are the glue holding America together during this crisis of confidence and trust.
In Dallas, Brown’s eloquence, remarkable for its simultaneous display of both toughness and tenderness, perfectly captures the growing complexity of policing and the diversity of its top ranks. His conduct since the slaughter of his heroic officers has embodied the definition of grace — courage under fire.
A man of deep religious faith who has suffered enormous personal tragedy, he has the moral and professional standing to offer inarguable conclusions. “We’re asking cops to do too much in this country,” Brown said. “Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve.”
He cited mental illness, drug abuse, family breakdown — they all wind up as “police matters” because civil society has thrown up its hands and turned its back.
It was such a poignant point that Obama echoed it, then trotted out a Democratic wish list of bigger government, as if spending more money on more programs is magic.
This anti-cop reaction is a form of prejudice, the only bigotry still acceptable on the left.
Again, imagine the grieving families feeling trapped in a political pep rally. President George W. Bush showed them respect, Brown showed them love, and Obama read a speech.
What the families deserved, and what the nation needs to hear, is a full-throated ode to the heroic nature of everyday policing and a defense of law enforcement — without caveats.
Certainly in a memorial service so soon after a massacre, it does not need to be said that not all police officers are angels. It was outrageous for Obama to go there.
In fact, no cop is an angel. They are human beings doing the most dangerous jobs possible, and they do it incredibly well most of the time.
If baseball players are regarded as heroes for succeeding 30 percent of the time, what’s the right word for cops who get the job done 90 and 95 percent of the time? Superheroes comes close.
Those are points Obama could never make without laboring to point out law enforcement’s flaws, some of them historical. He doesn’t get it because he refuses to.
At one point, he decried how national unity after tragedy inevitably breaks down as people return to their comfortable habits, then promptly mounted his own comfortable hobby horses of policy. Once again, he leads by the worst possible example.
As Obama has shown repeatedly in the last eight years, when he’s not called on to salute dead cops, he too often maligns the men and women in blue. He tried to combine the two themes yesterday, and it was a bust.
When police make mistakes, or even when they properly employ the deadly force they are authorized to use, too many people are ready to rip them to shreds, and too many others are cowed into silence.
This anti-cop reaction is a form of prejudice, the only bigotry still acceptable on the left. Pandering pols make matters worse by fanning the flames and give too much credence to the loudest voices.
Sheriff David Clarke in Milwaukee has been making those points for years, often on the Fox News and Fox Business channels. He blasted former Attorney General Eric Holder for attacking police as biased, railed against absent fathers in black neighborhoods, and gave simple advice to violence-ridden Chicago: “Get a new police chief.”
Smart New Yorkers, meanwhile, count themselves lucky to have Bratton running the NYPD because, despite fears that Mayor Bill de Blasio would usher in a new age of lawlessness, the commissioner has done the impossible: driven crime down further, to new historic lows. Indeed, the contrast between Bratton and de Blasio strikingly illustrates the national divide between real leaders and quisling pols.
The top cop criticizes the Black Lives Matter movement for employing destructive stereotypes about all police officers, while the mayor says the radical group “changed the national discussion for the better.”
What an odd word to use: “discussion.” While cops are being buried and are targets of thugs everywhere, de Blasio acts as if the outbreak of madness is a rational debate.
Obama and de Blasio represent contemporary leftist politics in a nutshell, and it’s not nearly good enough for the crisis America faces. The deep and growing lack of trust in our political leadership, and now the lethal attacks on police, reflect an unraveling of the social order.
And it couldn’t come at a worse time, with much of the world already suffering through the fires of terrorism and genocide. We need to strengthen our defenses, not undermine our defenders.
There should be no doubt: If we abandon our police, the police will abandon us. Some already have, as evidenced by the soaring murder rate in many big cities. If the public wants to coddle criminals, there isn’t much even the best cops can do.
In any event, it will never be sufficient consolation for politicians to shed tears and give speeches at the funerals of fallen heroes. They should be supporting the police while they are alive, which guarantees there will be fewer funerals.