Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker said on Sunday that President Obama’s “absence of leadership” had contributed to “anti-police rhetoric.”
CNN’s “State of the Union” host Jake Tapper read excerpts from Walker’s op-ed, published Sept. 2 on hotair.com, in which Walker said President Obama had used language that contributed to “anti-police-rhetoric.”
Walker wrote:
In the last six years under President Obama, we’ve seen a rise in anti-police rhetoric. Instead of hope and change, we’ve seen racial tensions worsen and a tendency to use law enforcement as a scapegoat.
Tapper read portions of the op-ed and then asked Walker, “Can you elaborate on how President Obama has played a role in the murder of police officers?”
“I think his absence of leadership, of speaking out on this issue, as a leader. It’s doesn’t matter whether you’re a governor, account executive, a mayor, or President of the United States, when people are going after the men and women in uniform, whether they’re a police officer or sheriff’s deputy or state trooper, the people who are overwhelmingly doing the right thing every day, putting their lives on the line to keep us safe in communities all across America, it is the duty of the President to stand up and say something about that, to speak up,” he said.
Tapper said that Obama had praised police officers.
Walker was quick to respond.
“He’s praised them, he’s praised them,” Walker said. “But he’s not speaking out about the fact that this rhetoric out there — and when you’ve got people say, we have people say pigs in a blanket at a rally, fry ’em up like bacon. That’s the kind of thing you need to speak out about. You need to say that is wrong.”
Earlier this month, there was a Black Lives Matter rally in which some participants chanted, “pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon,” tying that protest to recent deaths of police officers.
Watch Walker’s comments:
