On March 23, 2012, President Barack Obama gave a press conference in the Rose Garden. A little less than a month before, George Zimmerman, a self-appointed neighborhood watchman, had shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin after a violent encounter prosecutors said was instigated by Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida. Local police had released Zimmerman after five hours of questioning, saying there was not enough evidence to refute his claim of self-defense.
It was an obviously incomplete investigation, and the Martin family was demanding justice. In the weeks that had passed, journalists, especially Trymaine Lee then at The Huffington Post and Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic, had focused national attention on the case. Protests sprouted up around the country. The Department of Justice had begun to investigate the case, which was moved from the Sanford police to Florida state officials just a few days before Obama stepped into the Rose Garden to speak, squinting into the sun.
There had been pressure on Obama to say something, but the last time he’d commented explicitly on an event that revealed the racism inherent in our criminal justice system—the arrest of the Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., outside his own home on suspicion of attempting to break in—the uproar had been loud, partisan, and damaging, leading to the spectacle of the Beer Summit.
“I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this,” Obama told reporters that day. He said his first thoughts were with the Martin family, and also that he was thinking of his own kids. Obama paused often, and spoke in careful, measured words. Then he ventured out. “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” he said. Obama would reiterate this sentiment in a speech more than a year later, shortly after Zimmerman was tried and acquitted. “Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.”
Before Obama said these words, the conservative press had joined in the condemnation of Zimmerman: Now they seemed to rise in his defense. The issue had been a unifying one—a then-28-year-old man had shot someone who was barely more than a boy, and who was also unarmed, but had not been forced to answer questions in court. Now the issue was partisan.
The incident illustrates the limits of empathy in this country, and how often these limits accord with the racial barrier. For Obama, and for many other Americans, it might seem natural to empathize with the parents of a 17-year-old who’d just been shot and killed for no reason. But as Nikole Hannah-Jones showed in an interview with a white Iowan who had voted for Obama but switched to Republican Donald Trump this year, this was a turning point for many white Americans. “Obama really turned her off when after a vigilante killed a black teenager named Trayvon Martin, he said the boy could have been his son,” Hannah-Jones wrote about the voter, Gretchen Douglas. “She felt as if Obama was choosing a side in the racial divide, stirring up tensions.”
It’s possible, then, to trace a line from Obama’s comments about Martin to the election of Donald Trump, a man who won on racial fear-mongering and is likely to dismantle Obama’s legacy. I think about that when I re-listen to Obama’s speeches about Martin. I also think of something else: Obama’s power and how he has chosen to use it—and when he’s chosen not to.
As America’s first black president, Obama has always had to walk a fine line when he speaks about race. But he has also chosen to walk a careful path on everything else, and that path has been largely reactive. The power of the president to channel and shape national attention, to focus on important issues, might be overrated, but Obama, ever the cautious conciliator, seems not to have tried. His presidency was often one of frustrating, patient deference to Congress, to process, to institutions. Even after Zimmerman was acquitted in the Martin shooting, Obama chose his words to assure Americans that the system had functioned. “Once the jury has spoken, that’s how our system works,” he said.
Obama is still attempting to pacify Americans in the face of evidence that our election was tampered with by the Russian government, and that North Carolina’s current Republican government is actively working to thwart democracy there. But is pacification what we need? Michelle Goldberg wrote in Slate about the president’s recent press conference on the intelligence regarding Russian interference, arguing that he failed to address the real concerns of stunned liberals and Democrats, a party he is supposed to be the leader of. “Obama might have rallied them by laying out the alarming political implications of the CIA’s findings,” she wrote. “Instead, he minimized them. It was not a reassuring performance. His refusal to acknowledge the intense alarm felt by his supporters only exacerbates it.”
In some ways, this has been true throughout his presidency. When he had the opportunity, in 2009, amid widespread public anger over the financial system that caused a housing crash and exacerbated wealth inequality, he did not go after the banks as hard as he could and should have, rhetorically or substantively. From the outside, he could seem uninvolved in his own fight over health-care reform. And though he’d built a massive campaign operation over the hard-fought elections of 2008 and 2012, he now seems not to have bequeathed it to the Democratic Party.
Unlike our incoming president, when it comes to the national conversation, Obama has always seemed to respect the idea of limits on his power—how his words might make a situation worse, or politicize something that shouldn’t be politicized, as in the Martin case. But what if he had fully embraced the potential for his words to move our discourse, to really lead thought?
Instead, he’s always come off as a little above the fray, and by extension, a little above his peers, a tactic described clearly by the First Lady in her Democratic National Convention speech: “When they go low, we go high.” That seems like fine advice for a kid in a schoolyard. In politics, though, the best fighters have to get down in the dirt. Perhaps Obama wanted to keep his image clean, and in this I see a fundamental conservatism and elitism: He is ultimately comfortable leaving the rest of us in the mosh pit, yet finds low-key ways to hold us responsible when we can’t get out of it unscathed, or when we don’t live up to his faith in us. I wonder how much blame history will lay at his feet, for not going further to protect his own legacy.
Trump will likely use the power of the presidency as a bully pulpit to attack personal enemies and complain about personal grievances, turning social media into a tool for circumventing the First Amendment and distracting from his attempts to dismantle our government. If he steps into the Rose Garden for a press conference—if he ever performs any of the basic duties of a president—his speeches will evince empathy for no one. But he will never be afraid to speak his mind, and he will use that power to move the conversation toward himself, and away from wherever else it might go.
This is the eleventh installment of a 12-part series celebrating the legacy of President Obama and his administration. Read the tenth installment here.
