OPINION:
The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a civil rights icon, died peacefully at his home in Chicago in mid-February.
Jackson, 84, had a vision of a “rainbow coalition” that would represent the poor and forgotten in America. After the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, he became one of America’s most influential Black figures. He ran for president twice, long before the election of Barack Obama in 2008.
Before Jackson’s public funeral Friday, his son Jesse Jackson Jr. made clear the services were “welcome to all,” including Democrats, Republicans, liberals and conservatives. He did, however, have one request of the attendees: “Do not bring your politics.”
Mr. Obama not only brought his politics, but he also made Jackson’s eulogy a denunciation of half of America.
“We are living in a time when it can be hard to hope,” said Mr. Obama, addressing Jackson’s mourners. “Each day we wake up to some new assault on our democratic institutions, another setback to the idea of the rule of law. An offense to common decency.
“Each day, we’re told by those in high office to fear each other and to turn on each other, and that some Americans count more than others, and that some don’t even count at all.
“Everywhere we see greed and bigotry being celebrated and bullying and mockery masquerading as strength; we see science and expertise denigrated while ignorance and dishonesty, and cruelty and corruption, are reaping untold rewards. Every single day, we see that. And it’s hard to hope in those moments.”
Although Mr. Obama didn’t call out the Trump administration by name, his message was clear: You can be proud and have hope in America only when Democrats are in charge.
Mr. Obama’s tenure as president, while championed by the mainstream media as one of “hope,” “change” and “unity,” was frequently marred by his elitist, patronizing and condescending lectures to those who didn’t agree with him. While pretending to be a unifier, Mr. Obama frequently lashed out at White, working-class, small-town Americans who “cling to guns, or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” because of their economic plight.
Mr. Obama sowed distrust among law enforcement when he, without evidence, blamed them for racial profiling after a simple misunderstanding led to Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s detention.
Mr. Obama dove into the race debate by saying the Cambridge, Massachusetts, police at the time “acted stupidly” and cited “a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.”
With that one statement, Mr. Obama shattered any progress he had made on the campaign trail of racial optimism, which was central to his perceived narrative of hope.
Since leaving office and collecting millions of dollars from paid speeches and a partnership with Netflix, Mr. Obama’s wife, Michelle Obama, doesn’t look back fondly at their time in the White House. On her podcast, she has lamented how Mr. Trump’s behavior would have never been tolerated from the “first Black family” and that she felt her time there was “confining” because of America’s expectations of them.
She has warned that the U.S. is not yet ready for a female president because of its ongoing misogyny. She has complained about racist “White folks’” hairstyles and has said that as a Black woman, no one has ever given her permission to articulate her pain because, well, racism.
This, after Mr. Obama was elected to the presidency twice, and as Mrs. Obama is lauded for graduating from two Ivy League institutions.
To demonstrate how they have risen above partisan politics and are seeking to heal this divided country, the Obamas made clear that former President George W. Bush would be invited to the grand opening of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago in June, but that Mr. Trump wouldn’t be.
“When visitors look up at the Obama Presidential Center’s Museum building, they’ll see three words: ‘You are America.’ Those words come from a speech I gave in Selma on the 50th anniversary of the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge,” Mr. Obama wrote in a video of the center on Instagram. “They’re meant to honor the men and women who came before us, and to inspire the next generation to be messengers of hope.”
This deliberately excludes Mr. Trump.
“This is really a chance for us to celebrate with the people who joined President Obama on this journey, the ordinary people who did the extraordinary things,” Valerie Jarrett, former adviser to Mr. Obama, said of the invite list. She added that after the center is opened, “Should President Trump want to come and tour the center, President Obama would be delighted for him to do so.”
After Mr. Obama’s eulogy of Jackson on Friday, his son blasted the former president, and Messrs. Clinton and Biden, for not abiding by his nonpartisan wishes.
“Yesterday, I listened for several hours to three United States presidents who do not know Jesse Jackson,” Mr. Jackson said Saturday. The reverend’s son reiterated that his father’s legacy wasn’t defined by the “political order,” but by those who were marginalized.
“[Jackson] maintained a tense relationship with the political order, not because the presidents were White or Black but the demands of our message, the demands of speaking for the least of these — those who are disinherited, the damned, the dispossessed, the disrespected — demanded not Democratic or Republican solutions, but demanded a consistent, prophetic voice that at no point in time sold us out as a people,” Mr. Jackson concluded.
It’s a message the Obamas have yet to learn.
• Kelly Sadler is the commentary editor at The Washington Times.
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