New York Times
GARDINER HARRIS
President Obama will travel to Dallas on Tuesday to mourn the deaths of five white police officers gunned down by a black Army veteran, his latest effort to help bridge one of the starkest divides in American society.
He huddled with his speechwriters for much of Monday, hoping to find words that would not only console the officers’ grief-stricken families but also reassure a nation fearful that racial divisions are worsening after the Dallas slaughter and the killing days before of black men by the police in Louisiana and Minnesota.
Mr. Obama approached the effort with the frustration of a man who has poured his heart and soul into similar speeches, only to later feel that nothing has changed and no one is listening. This will be the 11th time in his presidency that he has sought to comfort a city after a mass killing, and the second time in a month that such a killing grew out of bias.
“The president recognizes that it’s not just people in Dallas who are grieving, it’s people all across the country who are concerned about the violence that so many Americans have witnessed in the last week or so,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said on Monday.
Mr. Obama’s task is especially tough because Dallas has already undertaken many of the steps that his administration has advocated to improve race relations and foster better community ties with the police. The police chief, David O. Brown, has won high marks for his frank and unsparing remarks after the tragedy.
During a news conference on Monday, Chief Brown, who is black, said that he remained committed to reform, and his message to those protesting police conduct was simple: “Don’t be part of the problem. We’re hiring. Get out of the protest line and put an application in. We’ll put you in your neighborhood.”
Former President George W. Bush, who lives in Dallas, will also speak at Tuesday’s memorial, a rare event in his post-presidency. While in office, Mr. Bush faced his own set of problems with the nation’s racial divisions.
As part of his message of “compassionate conservatism,” Mr. Bush made racial harmony a greater emphasis than many Republicans have in recent decades, and he sought to extend his party’s outreach to African-Americans, though without great electoral success. He won about 11 percent of the black vote in 2004, roughly the same as other modern Republican nominees who did not face Mr. Obama.
Mr. Bush appointed the first and second black secretaries of state and promoted his No Child Left Behind education program in part to help minority students and to combat what he called the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”
He did not face the sort of repeated racially charged episodes that have occurred during Mr. Obama’s presidency, but he was heavily criticized for not reacting faster to help New Orleans and its large African-American population after Hurricane Katrina. He wrote in his memoir that being accused of not caring about black victims was the lowest moment of his presidency.
Now, Mr. Bush is being called upon to help succor his own city.
As for Mr. Obama, his speech will almost certainly call for greater understanding from all sides of the debate while emphasizing that race relations are much improved since the 1960s.
“When we start suggesting that somehow there is this enormous polarization and we’re back to the situation in the 1960s — that’s just not true,” Mr. Obama said on Saturday at a news conference in Warsaw. “You’re not seeing riots, and you’re not seeing police going after people who are protesting peacefully.”
Rather, concerns about police conduct have grown, he believes, in part because of the wide distribution of videos of the police on social media, which have heightened awareness even as episodes of improper behavior have declined.
“And the fact that we’re aware of it may increase some anxiety right now, and hurt and anger,” Mr. Obama said over the weekend. “But it’s been said, sunshine is the best disinfectant.” Mr. Obama has been criticized by civil rights leaders for choosing to visit Dallas instead of Louisiana or Minnesota. He has also been criticized by some police officials, who say he has worsened racial tensions by faulting some police conduct. “This president and his administration absolutely do not have our back and make our jobs more dangerous,” William J. Johnson, the executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, which represents about 240,000 law enforcement officers, said on Sunday.
On Monday, Mr. Johnson attended a meeting at the White House during which law enforcement officials discussed with Mr. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. the best ways to build trust between the police and communities.
In every speech on policing and race, Mr. Obama has tried to strike a balance, acknowledging bias in the criminal justice system but saying that it is not an indictment of all police officers.
“So when people say ‘black lives matter,’ that doesn’t mean blue lives don’t matter; it just means all lives matter, but right now the big concern is the fact that the data shows black folks are more vulnerable to these kinds of incidents,” Mr. Obama said just before the police officers were killed in Dallas. He will again walk that tightrope on Tuesday.
