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When he chose this week to respond to violent white nationalist protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, however, Obama used someone else's words instead of his own.

"'People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love,'" read the subsequent dispatches. "'For love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.'"

Obama's tweet was paired with a photo of the former president smiling at a group of children in a window, taken near his youngest daughter's school in 2011.

The viral reach of Obama's message was a reminder of his popularity among Americans nostalgic for the type of reasoned emotion he often brought after national trauma.

But the measured response also reflected the balance all former presidents face when confronted with divisive or charged moments. Ex-presidents often keep their distance from such matters, especially during their successor's first year in office. Offering frequent public comments about a new president's actions can be seen as overly meddlesome and a hindrance to a new White House's ability to function.

"I cannot imagine just how upset both he and (first lady) Michelle Obama are. We know their character, we know their history," said Michael Nutter, the former Democratic mayor of Philadelphia.

"I am sure President Obama would like to say more," Nutter said. "He recognizes, though, where he is in these moments, and his proximity to having just been a president. So he's going to be careful. But those of us who do know him a little bit know where his head and heart is. He'll continue to express himself but it will continue to be in his terms and in his time."

A senior Obama adviser said this week that the former President was unlikely to weigh in directly on Trump's comments, which have drawn widespread condemnation from Republicans, corporate executives, and military leaders.

For Obama, who remains the object of frequent criticism from Trump and his allies in the right-wing media, speaking out overtly could also further galvanize the political base to which Trump is appealing.

As Trump offered a series of equivocal statements on the Charlottesville violence this week, it became clear that condemnation would be swift even from members of his own party, who have rebuked the President with varying degrees of severity.

Those critiquing Trump at least implicitly included the two most recent Republican presidents, who said the country must always clearly denounce the types of ideologies that Trump initially avoided criticizing.

"America must always reject racial bigotry, anti-Semitism, and hatred in all forms," wrote Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush in a statement Wednesday. "As we pray for Charlottesville, we are reminded of the fundamental truths recorded by that city's most prominent citizen in the Declaration of Independence: we are all created equal and endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights."

"We know these truths to be everlasting because we have seen the decency and greatness of our country," the Bushes wrote.

During his own presidency, Obama confronted racially charged matters in different ways. His comments usually sought to acknowledge the country's painful history with race while encouraging reconciliation.

"The flag has always represented more than just ancestral pride," he said. "For many, black and white, that flag was a reminder of systemic oppression and racial subjugation. We see that now."

Since January, however, Obama hasn't spoken publicly about race. Obama, along with first lady Michelle Obama, has spent the last several months appearing sporadically at a mix of paid and unpaid speeches. They've both been at work on book projects, and next week their oldest daughter begins college at Harvard.

This fall, he's due to campaign for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, though specific dates for his appearances haven't been set. The protests in Charlottesville, which left three people dead, are expected to upend the race.

Two days before he left office in January, Obama laid out the parameters for his post-presidential life.

"I want to be quiet a little bit and not hear myself talk so darn much. I want to spend precious time with my girls," he said during his final news conference at the White House, before adding that he would make his voice heard when political debates escalated beyond day-to-day matters.

"There's a difference between that normal functioning of politics and certain issues or certain moments where I think our core values may be at stake," he said.

Some of Obama's supporters say the current strife may rise to that level.

"Personally I always want to hear President Obama. We know that if this had taken place a year ago, the country would be in a very very different place," Nutter said. "I'm not asking President Obama to say anything. He can conduct his own affairs. But we know that it would be healing, it would bring this country together."

CNN's Allie Malloy contributed to this report.

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Barack Obama declining to engage Trump reflects ex-president balancing act - CNN

Obscured by the tumult surrounding President Trumps horrendous response to the violence in Charlottesville, Va., the White House managed to take a significant positive step this week: issuing an executive order designed to lower regulatory barriers to infrastructure projects, and to speed up and simplify the process for obtaining necessary permits and clearances.

It wasnt the first White House to try. When I worked there in 2009, I called a meeting of agency officials, asking them to explore how we might streamline the permitting process for both individuals and companies.

About halfway into the one-hour meeting, I realized that none of the officials had offered even a single word in response to my question. Instead, they explained why nothing could be done as if the purpose of the meeting was to demonstrate that the status quo was great, and that it would be impossible to change it.

The status quo is not great. Its ridiculous. If the permitting bureaucracy were a supervillain, it would be the Blob. It can take several years, and millions of dollars, to obtain environmental clearance for construction permits, even if the goal is to develop green infrastructure and to improve the environment.

Significant reforms are needed in three areas.

The first involves the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires federal agencies to catalogue and consider environmental effects before they can proceed with actions that might hurt the environment. Its a well-intended law with an important goal, but in some respects its also a case study in unintended consequences.

Under the law, developers often have to navigate an expensive and costly approval process, potentially including draft environmental impact statements, comments on environmental-impact statements, nasty public hearings and final environmental-impact statements. If they manage to get through all that, they might well face a lawsuit from an environmental organization, maybe from community groups, and maybe from self-interested companies who just dont want the competition.

Environmental-impact statements can run to hundreds of pages. The review process can easily take three years or more, so agencies and developers sometimes just give up.

The second problem involves the number of entities with veto power. If you want to improve an airport, build a new highway or increase sources of renewable energy, you might have to deal with several state agencies, local officials and two or more federal agencies as well as an assortment of private organizations with economic or environmental concerns.

If even one of those agencies wants a delay, or has some kind of bee in its bonnet, it can stop the project in its tracks. For countless people (including small businesses and even individuals), its something out of Kafka: No ones in charge.

The third problem involves bureaucratic culture. For many permitting authorities, the incentive is to delay, to require more documentation or to just say no.

If an agency maintains the status quo, it will avoid negative public attention, noisy complaints from interest groups and potentially serious risks (environmental or otherwise). It might even look like a hero. It wont bear the costs of refusing to allow a project to go forward, even if they turn out to be very high for the American people.

Alert to these problems, the Obama administration issued some significant reforms, which included greater transparency, coordination and accountability. But more streamlining needs to be done.

Trumps executive order calls for tracking every major infrastructure project, with public disclosure of deadlines and of whether theyve been met, alongside potential penalties for poor performance. Importantly, it also requires measurement of the costs of environmental reviews.

One of its best provisions calls for one federal decision, meaning there will be a lead agency for every major infrastructure project with the responsibility for navigating the project through the federal environmental review and authorization process.

The order also imposes new obligations on the Department of the Interior, the Office of Management and Budget and the Council on Environmental Quality requiring them to reduce burdens and simplify the process.

For Trumps order to work, everything will depend, of course, on implementation. As President Harry Truman said of his Army-trained successor, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower: Hell sit here and hell say, Do this! Do that! And nothing will happen. Poor Ike it wont be a bit like the Army.

Defeating the Blob will require sustained follow-through from the executive branch, and both dedication and toughness on the part of its leadership. But lets give credit where its due: This weeks executive order provides an excellent foundation for achieving that goal.

Cass Sunstein is a Bloomberg View columnist.

2017, Bloomberg View

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Obama vet cheers Trump's assault on the red-tape Blob - New York Post

By Michael Eric Dyson By Michael Eric Dyson August 18 at 7:00 AM

After eight years of Obama, America was not ready to declare a cease-fire in the perpetual war over race, Peter Baker writes in Obama: The Call of History, his compelling and concise survey of the first black presidents two terms in office. If anything, it seemed to be escalating again.

Journalism may be historys first draft, but Bakers words might qualify as prophecys first blush. To be sure, it wasnt hard to see that Barack Obamas successor, Donald Trump, would plumb the depths of racial animus to paint his twisted vision of America. Hed offered us a foreboding sketch of his insidious views when he hatefully scorned Obama, arguing that he wasnt a true American, saying, with no proof, that Obama was a Kenyan citizen, a Muslim interloper who was not to be trusted.

But little prepared us for the full bore of Trumps belligerent bigotry, the stunning scope of which swept into full view this past week when he drew false equivalence between white supremacists in Charlottesville and their vigilant protesters. Baker argues that Obamas scorn for Trump grew more visceral in the final days of the [2016] campaign and that it was hard [for Obama] to picture a President Trump.

Yet, Obamas initial reluctance to address race, the outlines of which Baker briefly traces, left an interpretive void that was grievously, and gleefully, filled by his successor, who is all too eager to ply his poisonous perspective. Baker argues that Obama picked up the pace of race talk in his second term, but it may have been far too little, far too late. When it came to race, Obama, as he did in his foreign policy, led from behind.

Baker, the chief White House correspondent for the New York Times, spends the bulk of his book writing about Obamas accomplishments getting the economy on good footing after the greatest financial collapse since the Depression, bailing out the automobile industry, passing a health-care overhaul, killing Osama bin Laden and his virtues, above all a self-discipline that, for all the controversies, allowed him to emerge from eight years in office without a hint of personal scandal. The book is both a compelling biography and a coffee-table, large-format work with beautiful photography commemorating the Obama years.

Baker also tackles the former presidents idiosyncrasies, including a much-discussed antipathy to politics, symbolized in an aloofness that spoiled his chances of backroom glad-handing and arm-twisting. And Baker touches on Obamas flaws, not least his inviolable and unwarranted belief that his oratory could inspire people from opposite ends of the political spectrum to forge bipartisan agreement. That idea quickly dissolved into rancorous resistance from Republicans during his tenure.

Baker tries to be fair about the matter: He measures the racial hostility Obama faced, while noting that presidents including Bill Clinton and George W. Bush also had their share of hatemongers and conspiracy theorists.

But Obamas time in office evoked a unique hatred that undoubtedly rested in race, if not alone, then at least primarily. No amount of ideological dispute or partisan disagreement could account for the relentless assault on his being president and on his being as president there was an ontological raid on the idea that a body and brain like his should exist and have the nerve to darken the Oval Office. Obama tapped something deep and enduring in the American soul some positive valve of renewable hopefulness that was improbably pitched against the horizon of American cynicism. By the same token, he pushed racial levers and buttons that seemed to irrationally infuriate and unite masses of white folk in opposition to his cause. Despite the celebrated multiracial coalition he summoned, the bulk of white America never cast a vote for Obama.

As much as it acknowledged his genius, this nation also punished Obama for existing at all. It viciously took him to task for being cosmopolitan and having political couth. Sure, like most presidents, Obama may have been arrogant, as Baker notes, but it was, finally, in part at least, a redemptive self-confidence that hoisted a faltering nation atop his thin shoulders. Yet many white Americans resented him for saving them, resented him for holding our fragile union together until it was, alas, fractured into a million prejudiced pieces by an inept caricature of a leader who is allergic to gravitas.

No matter the warts and blemishes Baker explores Obamas continuation and expansion of Bushs use of drones and his massive deportation of immigrants suggest he didnt deserve a Nobel Peace Prize there is little denying that Obama remains a remarkable figure, a dignified embodiment of the decorum that ought to attend the presidency.

And yet, as much damage as Trump has wrought, as perilous and vexing as his bitterly ignorant views on race manage to be, Obama must be held to account for failing to sow as widely as he might have the seeds of racial justice. Thats in part because he truly believed he was the smartest man in the room when it came to race he was high on race-neutral policies that he thought would tame a skeptical public and raise black boats as the nations tide of prosperity rose. He kept his own counsel and refused to listen to challenging black voices that may have sanctioned his willfully oblivious or naive views.

But there were more sinister undertones to Obamas rhetoric, more flaws in his outlook, than Baker acknowledges. Obama often enough lashed black folk in public belittling Morehouse College graduates in a commencement speech, blaming black people for using poverty as an excuse to commit crime in his address at the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, needling black members of Congress with the condescending exhortation to stop complaining, take off their bedroom slippers and put on their marching boots. Obama could identify what he thought of as black pathology in remorselessly granular detail. Yet he could hardly utter a discouraging word to white America, wouldnt dare take the same liberties with them as he did with his own.

That seems to make sense you can say to your kinfolk what you cant say to company except it doesnt, because Obama went out of his way to proclaim himself not black Americas president but everybodys president: everybody, it seemed, except black folk. The paradox is that he was our benighted symbol of progress, yet his greatest swagger may have flashed as he reprimanded rather than represented us.

Trump is a churlish, indecent man. He is a pitiful president who amplifies racist ignobility and echoes the harangues of the brutish bigots who declare their hate as a tarnished badge of courage. As Bakers eloquent account of Obamas sometimes majestic, always complicated presidency makes plain, Obama is a brilliant, decent and sometimes noble man who graced his office with intelligence and humanity, qualities that fled the scene when he left the White House.

It is a shame that he failed to engage race with the sensitivity, balance, candor, intricacy, insight and enormous comprehension of which he was capable. There were dire consequences when a man of superior talent failed to talk about race though, it must be admitted, his supporters did him no favor by saying he was hemmed in and couldnt speak about such things because it would upset white folk. That ignores how Obamas very being, his very breath, his very body, upset white folk.

Obamas refusal to admit that and therefore, to offer our fatally fractured country the tough wisdom he might have given us had he surrendered the fantasy of massive white support is a national tragedy. More tragic still is that his unwillingness for much of his term in office to talk about race left a derisive vacuum for a village idiot to slip right in and willingly spew vile unlearnedness. Baker may be right that Obama detested Trump as the 2016 campaign wore on, but the first black president must reckon with the fact that he helped put the greatest threat to his legacy in office.

Obama

The Call of History

By Peter Baker

New York Times/Callaway. 319 pp. $50

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Is Obama to blame for Trump and the revival of white supremacist hate? - Washington Post

President Trump has given the go-ahead for a plan dating from the Obama administration to elevate US Cyber Command to the level of Unified Combatant Command, giving it more operational independence from the National Security Agency. The statement also raised the possibility of splitting off CyberCom from the NSA entirely.

Both actions were recommended by former former Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter last year, as he told TechCrunch at the time.

At the moment, we have the NSA, which is part of the intelligence community, managed by the Department of Defense, and CyberCom, which is a combat group whose first job is to protect, Carter said during an interview at Disrupt SF. We had them both in the same location and able to work with one another. That has worked very well, but it is not necessarily the right approach.

Both organizations are currently led under a dual-hat system, where the director of the NSA currently Admiral Mike Rogers also leads Cyber Command. Last year the idea of splitting the two was met with resistance from the Committee on Armed Services, specifically Senator McCain, who resented the plans being made without their consultation. He wholeheartedly supports the plan now, though.

There are currently nine Unified Combatant Commands, organized both by region and responsibility. For instance, Pacific Command oversees that ocean, southeast Asia, and Australia, while Transportation Command is in charge of mobility assets worldwide. CyberCom, originally underneath Strategic Command, would join the ranks and get its own seat at the table.

If the split were to take place, an interesting consequence would be that the NSA could be led by a civilian. However, theres no indication now of how leadership will change, who will be in charge of what, or when. The green light is really just the start, and well know more soon.

Staffing the enhanced CyberCom might be a challenge, since the military would be vying with top recruiters from tech and security firms. It will help, though, that potential recruits will see that cybersecurity is no longer being treated as a lesser discipline and only tangentially related to warfare and defense at large.

Whatever happens, this concrete action to invest in the countrys cybersecurity infrastructure will likely be welcomed by many. There is a sense that we are being outplayed by cyber operatives in countries and organizations all over the world, from Russia to IS. And a rising tide, in this case increased attention and federal investment, would presumably raise all boats in the industry.

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Trump approves Obama-era plan for a more independent US Cyber Command - TechCrunch

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Barack Obama ran on a campaign promising change throughout the U.S. before he was elected to President of the United States nine years ago, but its a promise that Vic Mensa feels he wasnt able to keep. Speaking with TV and radio host Larry King during an episode of Larry King Now, Mensa offers his take on Obamas impact while he was in the White Houseor lack thereof.

I dont really believe so, says The Autobiography rapper after being asked if he felt represented by the beloved former president. I live five, six blocks away from Barack Obamas home. So I watched my neighborhood not improve and my city not improve and my community not improve, maybe get worse in the time that Obama was in office. And I recognize that hes the president of the United States, but I dont think that Obamas agenda was very often to represent the people and do well by the people. I feel like he was often times very careful with what he said regarding race.

Just before asking Mensa about Obama, King asks the rapperif the ever-controversial President Trump is a disappointment. Mensas answer? Pretty much.

I think hes as expected, says Mensa, who also calls Trump a bold-faced liar.I would say that hes clearly in office for his personal gain and for his financial gain, and we dont know the full game yet, but theres a lot of nepotism going on.Mensa goes on to say hes resigned to the idea that people from his community wont be getting the win they hoped for on the big political stage.

Check out more of Mensas conversation with King in the video below. Beneath that, you can listen to him discussing Justin Bieber, saying he supports the singers sudden decision to cancel the rest of his Purpose world tour.

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Vic Mensa Criticizes Barack Obama's White House Agenda - XXLMAG.COM