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As images of looting, rioting and fires from the east coast city
transfixed the nation, Obama acknowledged on Tuesday he would be
unable to win support for the kind of broad economic and
criminal-justice reforms needed to transform urban neighborhoods.
He has focused on more modest efforts, last year launching My
Brother's Keeper, a mentoring and support program aimed at helping
at-risk African-American children and young men in urban areas.
Obama has touted the initiative as a means to combat the kind of
inner-city turmoil seen in Baltimore, but it remains in its infancy.
Early last year, he also created several so-called inner-city
“promise zones” in a small-scale effort to spur development.
As he approaches the last year-and-a-half of his presidency, some
leaders of the black community are voicing frustration at a lack of
more comprehensive efforts from the White House.
“We stepped back from the economic brink, but the president is in a
position to do something around social mobility and income
inequality that we have not been heretofore been able to do,”
Cornell William Brooks, president of the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People, told Reuters.
Facing Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress, Obama has
used his executive powers in recent months to bypass the legislature
and enact major policy shifts on immigration, climate change and
detente with Communist Cuba.
But similar actions to address the poverty and crime that affect
black neighborhoods the most are far more difficult because of
Congress's power over spending at a time when fiscal conservatism
has been on the rise among Republicans.
STALLED INITIATIVES
In recent years Obama has proposed initiatives including free
community college for low-income students, a $500 billion program to
rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, and more tax credits for
working families. He also proposed criminal-sentencing reform for
non-violent drug offenders, raising the federal minimum wage to
increase social mobility,
All have failed or stalled amid opposition in Congress.
“I’m under no illusion that out of this Congress we’re going to get
massive investment in urban communities,” Obama said at a White
House news conference on Tuesday.
Obama’s own unique status as the nation’s first black president may
have afforded less political room to inject himself into a national
debate that is tinged by issues of race.
“It is very difficult for Obama to take an action that would not be
personalized,” said Lorenzo Morris, a political-science professor at
Howard University in Washington.
In addressing the Baltimore riots, Obama walked the same careful
line he has since riots swept the town of Ferguson in Missouri last
year over the shooting death of a black youth by a police officer.
He largely supported the police and condemned acts of violence,
while trying to empathize with peaceful protesters.
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“At this point in his administration, he should be willing to take
risks,” Morris said.
Representative George “G.K.” Butterfield, a North Carolina Democrat
who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus, told Reuters that a
“national emergency” should be declared for high-unemployment urban
areas and that Congress needed to act on sentencing reform so that
young offenders aren’t locked out of the job market.
“Public opinion influences leadership and I think public opinion is
turning in the direction of criminal justice reform,” he said.
Charles Grassley, the Republican senator from Iowa who chairs the
Senate Judiciary Committee, this week signaled a willingness to
consider such a reform bill.
But Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican
majority leader in the House, said his party would not consider any
new legislation until the situation in Baltimore had calmed down.
"If there’s a better way of going about doing something, we’ll look
at it,” he said. “But this is a situation that has gotten out of
control, it is unacceptable.”
There is little in the offing on the economic front. Harry Reid, the
Democratic leader in the Senate, berated his colleagues Tuesday for
proposing so little in terms of job creation. “Looking out at the
year ahead, the only piece of legislation I see on the agenda that
does anything to create jobs is a surface transportation bill.
There’s nothing else.”
Reid, too, said he saw the riots in Baltimore as a call to address
the issue of rising inequality and lower social mobility.
“Let’s not pretend the path from poverty like the one I traveled is
still available to everyone out there as long as they work hard,”
Reid said.
(Additional reporting by David Lawder; Editing by Stuart Grudgings.)
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