Obama triumphant? President turns gaze to progress on guns, race and votes

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/29/obama-triumphant-president-guns-race-votes

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Related: Obama gives searing speech on race in eulogy for Charleston pastor

When Barack Obama hosts military heroes at the White House on Saturday at the traditional Fourth of July barbecue and fireworks display on the South Lawn, he will be marking more than the annual celebration of the Declaration of Independence. This year, he will also be extolling the cementing of his presidential legacy.

In the past 10 days, through the intervention of America’s top judges combined with public revulsion towards the murderous actions of a white supremacist, Obama has seen the national mood shift sharply in his direction. His signature healthcare reform, Obamacare, has been secured at least for now; gay marriage has been elevated into a constitutional right; and the Confederate flag has been torn down across the deep south.

With the winds of change behind him, a newly confident president has been visible. In contrast to the muted, cautious politician who hunkered down in the Oval Office through much of the past six years, to the dismay of many of his liberal supporters, a full-throated progressive firebrand has reemerged, reminiscent of the Barack Obama of 2008 who wowed the country during his first presidential campaign.

That new-found fire in the belly was evident when the White House was bathed in rainbow colors on the night of the supreme court ruling on gay marriage – a symbolic gesture approved by Obama less than four years after he publicly opposed same-sex marriages.

Last Friday, it was again on display at the funeral of Reverend Clementa Pinckney, one of nine victims of the Charleston church shooting. Delivering the eulogy, Obama both metaphorically and literally found his voice – he memorably sang Amazing Grace to a dazzled crowd of largely black mourners.

But after an extraordinary week, one so rarely enjoyed by presidents of either political colour, what will Obama do with this unexpected boost to his political capital?

As Professor Bruce Buchanan, a specialist in presidential politics at the University of Texas at Austin, put it: “I think the president has won back some credibility from the vindication of his policy stances and moral authority from his powerful statement following the Charleston killings.

“It remains to be seen if he can use either as leverage to press his remaining policy ambitions.”

Obama made a rod for his own back in his Charleston eulogy, when he lamented the normal pattern of things where terrible events such as the mass shooting at the Emanuel AME church are followed by talk but no action.

“We don’t need more talk,” he said. “To settle for symbolic gestures without following up with the hard work of more lasting change – that’s how we lose our way again.”

So what kind of lasting change could Obama go for in his final 19 months in office? In Charleston he provided some clues to his ambitions, if not his policy directions.

He referred to the need to introduce new gun safety measures to address the “unique mayhem that gun violence inflicts on this nation”. He also name-checked reform of the criminal justice system to remove its inbuilt bias towards locking up young black men; the need for revised training to rebuild trust between the police and the communities they serve; the existence of discrimination in the workplace that meant “Johnny got called back for a job interview but not Jamal”; and the threat to voting rights for African American citizens from a raft of Republican-led state legislative attacks.

Related: 'Love is love': Obama lauds gay marriage activists in hailing 'a victory for America'

Of those, the most promising area for real political change in the dwindling days of the Obama presidency is criminal justice reform. America’s historically, and globally high, rate of incarceration – with more than 2 million people behind bars – has begun to attract a level of bipartisan consensus almost unseen in any other policy area.

In January, the Koch brothers, the libertarian billionaires who have spearheaded the Republican drive to the right over the past two decades, announced that they were joining forces with progressive groups in a collective effort to combat what they called the “overcriminalization of America”. The Obama administration, through the Department of Justice, has pushed through a number of sentencing reforms that have driven down the imposition of long mandatory prison terms for drug offenders – a trend that the new US attorney general Loretta Lynch has promised to continue.

Randall Kennedy, a professor at Harvard law school who is an authority on racial conflict and civil rights, observed that Obama continued to dwell on the tragedy of gun deaths in the United States.

“It seems to me that the thing that got him most emotionally engaged in the past week has been gun violence,” Kennedy said. “I don’t know what he’s going to do, but I think that this is one area he’s driven to work on even though it seems pretty clear that Congress won’t do anything major with it.”

Obama has in the past expended so much political capital with so little result that he has looked like a president who had recognised he was on the losing side of the argument, and bowed out. Following the tragedy at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, in which 20 children and six adults were shot dead, he attempted to push through new gun controls including universal FBI background checks on all firearms purchases. He was roundly defeated by a fierce campaign from the National Rifle Association.

On Sunday, Obama put out a new email to his supporters through his personal political listserv compiled during his two presidential campaigns, now called Organizing for Action. In the message, he exhorted his followers to stand against gun violence.

Though he specified no practical moves that could be made by the White House, he did suggest that progress was possible at local level.

“As we take the time to heal in the shadow of this most recent tragedy, we have to ask ourselves what more we can do as individuals and communities to prevent guns from getting into the hands of dangerous individuals,” the message said.

“The lack of movement in Congress on this issue is incredibly frustrating. But their refusal to act won’t stop progress. No single reform will eliminate violence. But we can’t give up, or act like this is some kind of new normal. We have to make progress where we can.”

Obama also has voting rights on his mind. In June 2013, the US supreme court stripped out a key element of the Voting Rights Act that had prevented politicians, largely in the south, from meddling with voting procedures without federal permission. The change, in Shelby County v Holder, means that the 2016 presidential election will be the first in 50 years to be held without full federal protections for African American, poor and elderly voters, vulnerable to attacks on their access to the polls.

Wendy Weiser, head of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said there were several critical ways in which the Obama administration could shore up fairness in voting. Obama could bypass Republican intransigence in Congress, she said, by using his executive powers to instigate a federal drive to register new voters – between a quarter and a third of all Americans of voting age are still detached from the democratic process.

Weiser said Obama could also put his executive muscle behind two federal bills currently before Congress that would restore the hole punched into the Voting Rights Act by the Shelby ruling. And he could also immediately pass an executive order to inject greater accountability into political finance by ordering all government contractors to disclose their campaign donations.

“We are entering the first presidential election in half a century without the protections of the Voting Rights Act at a time when the country still faces critical problems of racial discrimination,” Weiser said.

“I’m optimistic that this administration, as it looks towards its legacy, will move decisively to make a difference and shore up American democracy.”