Former president Barack Obama criticized 2024 Republican presidential candidates Nikki Haley and Senator Tim Scott as part of 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.’”
Obama’s comments came during an appearance on The Axe Files podcast with David Axelrod, who suggested that Republicans like Scott share “half” of the former president’s view on race relations, the part about progress being made. The Democratic strategist, a longtime Obama adviser, also said Republicans believe racial strife is “part of the past and we don’t need to worry about it so much.”
Axelrod asked Obama about Scott’s suggestion that Republicans are “doing a fabulous job of making progress” on race.
Obama said there should be an “honest accounting of our past and our present” within the Republican Party.
“I’m not being cynical about Tim Scott individually. I am maybe suggesting that the rhetoric of ‘can’t we all get along?’ – and those quotes you made about, you know, from my speech in 2004 about there’s a ‘United States of America’ – that has to be undergirded with an honest accounting of our past and our present,” Obama said, though he noted he hasn’t spent a lot of time listening to Scott’s speeches.
He continued: “And so, if a Republican who may even be sincere in saying ‘I want us all to live together’ doesn’t have a plan for how do we address crippling generational poverty that is a consequence of hundreds of years of racism in this society and we need to do something about that. … If somebody is not proposing, both acknowledging and proposing elements that say, ‘No, we can’t just ignore all that and pretend as if everything’s equal and fair. We actually have to walk the walk and not just talk the talk.’ If they’re not doing that, then I think people are rightly skeptical.”
Obama said Haley has a “similar approach” to Scott on issues around race, and he said that “Clarence Thomas has probably gave the same speech at some point.”
Both candidates hit back against the former president’s comments.
Scott accused Obama of wasting the opportunity he had to bring the country together on race relations. “He missed a softball moving at slow speed with a big bat,” Scott told Mark Levin.
“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 spoke about, joining hands and singing with new meaning, ‘My country ‘tis of thee,’” he added.
Scott went on to say that “the one thing the far left does not want a Black person to be in this country is a conservative.”
“Let us not forget we are a land of opportunity, not a land of oppression,” Scott added in a tweet. Democrats deny our progress to protect their power. The Left wants you to believe faith in America is a fraud and progress in our nation is a myth.”
Meanwhile, Haley accused Obama of setting “minorities back by singling them out as victims instead of empowering them.”
“In America, hard work and personal responsibility matter,” she said. “My parents didn’t raise me to think that I would forever be a victim. They raised me to know that I was responsible for my success.”