Newt Gingrich Issues Brutal Critique of Obama: Race Relations At Their Worst in Decades

Newt Gingrich Issues Brutal Critique of Obama: Race Relations At Their Worst in Decades

In a Monday interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (who will be at next week’s National Conservative Student Conference) blamed President Obama’s sustained rhetorical attacks on policemen for increased tension between the black community and law enforcement officials. When host Joe Scarborough asked Gingrich how we, as a nation, can move forward after the recent events in Baton Rouge and Dallas, Gingrich told Scarborough that after seven-and-a-half years with a black president and a black attorney general, race relations are worse now than at any point in the last seventeen years.  “How often has he [Obama] hit the police? He hit the police in Cambridge and he was wrong. He hit the police in Ferguson, he was wrong. He hit the police about Florida, he was wrong,” Gingrich explained, noting the presidents contribution to an increasing trend of society viewing police as the enemy instead of those serving to protect us. “We’ve got to better understand the experience of being black in America and in cities like Chicago where 3,200 people get killed during the Obama presidency, we better have a strategy that works. And we don’t,” the former Speaker told the host. Scarborough then asked Gingrich what type of strategy would help places like Chicago. Gingrich responded, saying, “Well, you can start with New York City which has reduced the murder rate by 85-percent from what it was when Giuliani went in. Nobody on the Left wants to hear that, but you look at the number of thousands of people who’d be alive today if Chicago had the New York strategy.” “Why don’t they?” Scarborough asked. “I think because they think it’s too intrusive [and] it requires too many policemen. They don’t want to spend the money on cops,” Gingrich replied. He continued, “Well, you don’t spend the money on cops, you spend the money on funerals.” When the “Morning Joe” host inquired whether or not Gingrich viewed President Obama’s remarks after the police shootings in Baton Rouge and Dallas as a step forward in “the right direction,” Gingrich wasn’t shy in his censure of Obama, whose comments he viewed as too little too late. “Yeah, seven and a half years into his presidency he began to realize now that we’ve had two massacres of policemen that maybe as president of the United States and leader of law and order in America, you should say something on behalf of law and order,” Gingrich replied. “I mean, that’s fairly pathetic.” Newt Gingrich will be addressing YAF’s National Conservative Student Conference on Tuesday, July 26. The speech will be available live here.