By Leslie Larson
Barack Obama (Photo credit: jamesomalley)
With unprecedented candor, President Obama spoke about the prejudice he has faced as an African-American man — prompting Wall Street Journal reporter Katie Rosman to recall witnessing Obama being mistaken for a waiter at a Manhattan soiree 10 years ago.
Calling discrimination against black men “inescapable,” the President addressed the controversial acquittal of George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin case that has sparked massive outrage this week, surprising members of the press Friday during the White House briefing.
“There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. ..who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me — at least before I was a senator.”
n response to the President’s deeply personal comments, the Wall Street Journal reporter reminded readers of an encounter with Obama in 2003, then a candidate for U.S. Senate, when he was mistaken for a waiter at a NYC gathering.
Some of the best and brightest of the New York literati attended the shindig, hosted by British journalist Tina Brown, to celebrate Sidney Blumenthal’s book “The Clinton Wars,” Rosman recounted in a 2008 blog posting entitled “Before He Was President.”
Rosman noticed Obama “as awkward and out-of-place…one of a few black people in attendance” at the party.
soulbrotherspeaks.com 
The Perfect Speech for an Imperfect Union
A screengrab from President Barack Obama’s first White House news conference. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
By David Swerdlick
Though, like so many others, I was moved by President Barack Obama’s insightful remarks at Friday’s White House press briefing, I stand by my view that the president would have been better served in the long run if he’d let his original comments on the George Zimmerman verdict stand on their own.
Because as I wrote Monday, as “the most visible — and powerful — black man in the world,” Obama “ought to speak out — and has spoken out — in support of Trayvon Martin’s family,” even though, for better or worse, because he’s the president, “it’s also his job to represent the American system, with all its attendant flaws.”
And though I don’t in any way think that what he said Friday disrespected the verdict or the jury that rendered it, if he had asked me, I would still have advised him to move on and let the rest of us continue the debate that’s taking place on cable news and Twitter as well as in the halls of Congress and living rooms.
It had been edifying — to me, anyway — that President Obama had stayed above all the fray.
But since he did choose to speak on America’s relationship with a gunned-down black teenager whom the president mournfully described as a young man who “could have been me 35 years ago,” the reflection Obama offered reminded me of what Wall Street Journal columnist and former Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan said about Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech back in 2008: that then-Sen. Obama’s words were “as honest a speech as one in his position could give within the limits imposed by politics.”
And you could say the same about his eloquent valediction for the late Trayvon Martin.
Given his tears after Newtown, Conn., and his heartbreaking State of the Union remembrance that slain Chicago teenager Hadiya Pendleton was “a majorette” who “loved Fig Newtons and lip gloss,” it seems pretty clear that it’s this kind of stuff that gets to him as a father.
t would have been tough for Obama to give a more balanced, sober or hopeful exposition of where we should go from here. And while acknowledging the limits of a president, or government, to bring an immediate sense of healing or justice to the tragedy, Obama did offer a template for thinking constructively about its aftermath. No matter what his detractors say — and they’ll say plenty — it’s hard to have heard the speech and not feel that just like the rest of us, even the president is woeful that he can’t do more.
Read More Obama Statement on Zimmerman Verdict: He Chose His Words Well.