Former President Barack Obama and presidential hopeful Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., criticized one another’s handling of race this week, with Obama claiming Republican talk of American unity falls flat.
Democratic strategist David Axelrod interviewed Obama for CNN on Thursday and asked the former president what he thought of Scott’s discussions of race. Scott, meanwhile, argued that Obama missed an opportunity to bring the country together following his 2008 and 2012 elections.
“I think there’s a long history of African-American or other minority candidates within the Republican Party who will validate America and say, ‘Everything’s great, and we can make it.’ Nikki Haley I think has a similar approach,” Obama told Axelrod when asked about Scott. “I’m not being cynical about Tim Scott individually, but I am maybe suggesting the rhetoric of ‘Can’t we all get along’… That has to be undergirded with an honest accounting of our past and our present.”
Obama went on to argue that candidates must address racial disparities in the justice system and elsewhere if they want to be taken seriously when they talk about American unity.
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Meanwhile, Scott pushed back on Obama in a Thursday interview with Mark Levin, telling the radio host that Obama failed to bring the country together.
“When it comes to race, don’t you think Barack Obama missed a massive opportunity to pull the country together? To get people to accept each other for who they are instead of building into this group-ism?” Levin asked.
“Mark, he missed a softball moving at slow speed with a big bat,” Scott responded. “You can’t miss this opportunity. America was hungry for bringing our country together, this coalition building where you can see Black kids and White kids and red ones and brown ones, as MLK [Martin Luther King, Jr.] spoke about, joining hands and singing with new meaning, ‘My country ‘tis of thee.’”
“President Biden ran as the great uniter, and he has been the great divider. I have heard more negative things about people under his leadership than I have in a long time. I’ll tell you, the one thing the far left does not want a Black person to be in this country is a conservative,” he continued. “It is possible for Americans to come together not because of the color of our skin, but because of the consistency of our value system.”
Scott, the only black Republican in the Senate, announced his 2024 presidential campaign in late May, joining a crowded and still-growing field.
