The vocal leadership of the Democratic Party came out of the closet in 2020, demanding federal, state, and local municipalities ‘Defund the Police.’ But old guard liberals such as Obama prefer marketing campaigns that cleverly disguised the left’s anti-cop platform.
“If you believe, as I do, that we should be able to reform the criminal justice system so that it’s not biased, and treats everybody fairly, I guess you can use a snappy slogan like ‘Defund the Police,’” Obama reportedly said. “But you know you’ve lost a big audience the minute you say it. Which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes you want done.”
The facts are that Obama and Joe Biden systematically attacked law enforcement during their 8-year stint in the White House. Using the seemingly legitimate tools at his disposal, Obama directed the U.S. Department of Justice to undermine departments with high-profile officer-involved-shootings of African-Americans. By “high-profile,” Obama leveraged trendy headlines and reports from fake news outlets — such as CNN — to imply that law enforcement officials suffered from institutionalized racism.
For example, the Obama-Biden Justice Department issued a scathing rebuke of the Chicago and Baltimore departments claiming officers routinely used excessive force. Chicago and Baltimore struggled with extreme gun violence, drug trafficking, and murder rates. Rather than lend boots-on-the-ground police additional resources, departments were ordered to undergo wide-sweeping “reforms” that tied officers’ hands. The Obama-Biden administration effectively hamstrung law enforcement by falsely claiming the moral high ground. The results have been nothing but counterproductive.
And that’s precisely the political problem that the Democrats’ radical “Squad” is causing party members who agree but want to keep the agenda on the down-low. Old guard Democrat leaders have been unable to restrain Congresswomen Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), and Ayanna Pressley. Their socialist leanings and disdain for law enforcement prompted them to fire back at Obama on Twitter.
“We lose people in the hands of police. It’s not a slogan but a policy demand,” Rep. Omar tweeted. “And centering the demand for equitable investments and budgets for communities across the country gets us progress and safety.”
Rep. Tlaib went as far as to call the former president a hypocrite and launched a social media attack.
“Rosa Parks was vilified & attacked for her civil disobedience,” Tlaib wrote. “She was targeted. It’s hard seeing the same people who uplift her courage, attack the movement for Black lives that want us to prioritize health, funding of schools & ending poverty, rather than racist police systems.
But it was liberal firebrand AOC who couldn’t restrain herself from pulling back the veil on Obama’s soft-spoken, but discriminatory policies against community police.
“The thing that critics of activists don’t get is that they tried playing the ‘polite language’ policy game and all it did was make them easier to ignore,” AOC tweeted. “It wasn’t until they made folks uncomfortable that there was traction to do ANYTHING even if it wasn’t their full demands.”
Political pundits often point to what appears to be a fierce civil war within the Democratic Party. In reality, they are only fighting over marketing strategies. The difference between AOC and Obama is merely the language used to Defund the Police.
