President Barack Obama wrapped up his final press conference from the White House on Wednesday with a call for respect and understanding as a means to fight inequality. That included an impassioned defense of voting rights in which he dismissed allegations of voter fraud as “fake news.”
“I think we’re going to see people of merit rise up from every race, faith, corner of this country because that’s America’s strength,” he said, answering a question about whether the United States will see another black president. “If in fact we continue to keep opportunity open to everybody, then yeah. We’re going to have a woman president, we’re going to have a Latino president, we’ll have a Jewish president, a Hindu president.”
Obama then addressed his worries for the future.
“I won’t go through the whole list,” he said. “I worry about inequality.”
He cited racial and religious divisions, which he said are “not a good recipe” for American democracy.
“I worry about, as I said in response to a previous question, making sure that the basic machinery of our democracy works better,” Obama said. “We are the only country in the advanced world that makes it harder to vote rather than easier. And that dates back. There is an ugly history to that that we should not be shy about talking about.”
“Voter rights?” a reporter asked.
“Yes, I’m talking about voting rights,” Obama replied.
He cited Jim Crow and slavery as a historical precedent that he said made it seem “sort of acceptable” to restrict voting rights.
“That’s not who we are,” Obama said. “That shouldn’t be who we are. That’s not when America works best.”
He said that it should be “easier, not harder” to vote, and dismissed allegations of voting fraud as “fake news.”
“The notion that there are a whole bunch of people out there who are going out there and are not eligible to vote and want to vote,” Obama said. “We have the opposite problem. We have a whole bunch of people who are eligible to vote who don’t vote.”
He condemned gerrymandering, one of the issues that he reportedly plans to work to reform after leaving the White House, before turning back to racial issues, where he said there is “more work” to be done.
“It is simply not true that things have gotten worse. They haven’t. Things are getting better,” he said.
“But, you know, when we feel stress, when we feel pressure, when we’re just fed information that encourages some of our worst instincts, we tend to fall back into some of the old racial fears and racial divisions and racial stereotypes,” Obama said. “We’re going to have to make sure that we in our own lives and our own families and workplaces do a better job of treating everybody with basic respect.”
