I'll quote myself from earlier this year:
ETA: the thing that struck me about Obama's condemnation of wright was how much he concentrated on Wright saying "Obama is a politician, and speaks in the way politicians do. I'm a reverend, I speak the way reverends so." Both of these are...perfectly correct, really.
I said this even back before I joined here - and I view it as perfectly correct, and perfectly fine as well. I've always regarded Obama as center-left. I voted for him over McCain and Romney, and in the primaries symbolically over Clinton (and to be clear, they were close enough that this vote was absolutely about symbolism only), that never meant that I would agree with everything he did - and I don't expect that of any president. What he's saying is exactly what I expect he would say. He's a politician who shows up to build political power, not an activist who is there to push the overton window.
Again, as a politician, he's correct - but only one person actually ran in part on "defund the police", and that was the newly elected representative Cori Bush. A few others discussed it, in terms of "policing in my district should be the same as policing in wealthy suburbs", and even then they didn't outright push it. Both Biden and Sanders want to give the police additional funding for training. I'm skeptical that this won't go right to "warrior" policing and "killology" pro-violence garbage, particularly for police forces who most need drastic reform.
The black kids who are tired of police running up and beating them because they "fit the description" aren't there for friendly chats. They didn't swamp Bloomberg out by being nice or using the right slogan, they did it by pointing out that he's the guy that openly and willfully advocated for a violently racist policing policy to the point where even many lower-level police were (anonymously) giving interviews discussing how awful and counterproductive it was.
Will the slogan turn out to be helpful (and while it does state part of the policy, it's *also* a slogan)? Well, I looked into my crystal ball, and I saw the other side of my room, only upside-down and distorted, because that's the only thing they do. I don't know, and neither does anyone else. Took years, and video after video after video, of wildly unjustified racial police murders, for a slim majority to stop saying "No *all* lives matter! Why are you making this racial?"
