In a highly-emotional address to an African-American gathering, President Barack Obama exhorted black voters to go all-out to elect Hillary Clinton, signalling it will be a “personal insult” to his legacy if Donald Trump is not stopped.
Obama’s powerful intervention, made without explicitly taking the names of the two candidates, comes against the backdrop of a Trump resurgence, so much so that he is now not only virtually tied with Clinton in national polls, but has overtaken her in some key battleground States and whittled down her lead in some others.
Amid indications that there may be a lack of voting enthusiasm this time among the black community which otherwise is solidly for Clinton and against Trump, Obama said, “If I hear anybody saying their vote does not matter, that it doesn’t matter who we elect — read up on your history. It matters.”
“We’ve got to get people to vote. I will consider it a personal insult — an insult to my legacy — if this community lets down its guard and fails to activate itself in this election. You want to give me a good sendoffIJ Go vote,” he said while addressing the Congress Black Caucus gala here for the last time as President.
In perhaps his harshest critique of Trump from the standpoint of African-Americans, Obama ridiculed his recent assertions that he would be a better bet for black community and cast the New York billionaire as “somebody who has fought against civil rights, and fought against equality, and who has shown no regard for working people for most of his life”.
As he made his pitch for Clinton, Obama said progress, tolerance, democracy and justice are all on the ballot, adding one candidate (Clinton) will advance all those things, while the central campaign theme of the other candidate (Trump) is “opposition to all that we have done”.
“We do have challenges, but we’re not stupid. We know the progress we’ve made, despite the forces of opposition,” Obama said as he dealt with Trump’s recent campaign line that African-Americans may never have been so badly off as now in terms of jobs and living conditions.