#Democrats playing politics with Black Lives and other commentary

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and other Democratic lawmakers take a knee to observe a moment of silence on Capitol Hill for George Floyd and other victims of police brutality on June 8.
AFP via Getty Images

“Do black lives matter to Democrats?” asks Glenn Harlan Reynolds at USA Today. “A lot of black voters think the answer is no.” A Politico reporter spent time with “middle-class black voters outside Detroit” and “found they were disappointed in the Democrats” and “thought nothing much had changed for them during the Obama presidency.” Reynolds suspects that’s why “Democrats are blocking the GOP justice-reform bill in the Senate.” They’re “terrified” President Trump “might deliver a major reform bill in Congress before the election.” He has “already successfully pushed a criminal-justice reform package, the First Step Act,” and “issued an executive order limiting police chokeholds and other abusive behavior.” Dems would rather Congress pass no reform than have black voters “see Trump as performing where the Democrats . . . never did.”

Iconoclast: The Church of Social Justice

The “social-justice philosophy” behind Black Lives Matter protests is “less a political program” and more “a religion in all but name,” argues John McWhorter at Reason: Adherents “display their moral worth through opposition to racism,” just as Christians “display their moral worth through faith in Jesus.” Solving America’s real race problems “will require work”; chanting “allegiance with upraised hands to a series of anti-white-privilege tenets” and washing “black protesters’ feet” are just crypto-religious “self-flagellation routines.” This new religion holds that whites should “suspend logic and have faith” in the movement and “even has (metaphorical) sacrificial victims.” That would have “sickened” genuine civil-rights heroes, who fought “injustices with sense and logic.”

Liberal: Be Bold, Biden!

Before Joe Biden picks his running mate, advises Juan Williams at The Hill, he should “name three Cabinet secretaries” — Elizabeth Warren for Treasury, Amy Klobuchar for attorney general and Susan Rice for secretary of state — and Kamala Harris as his “first Supreme Court nominee.” Sure, the strategy creates “new targets for Trump to belittle,” but it also tells voters Biden is “fired up, ready to govern” and will energize suburban women and left-wingers. He should stipulate that Rice, Warren and Harris remain vice-presidential contenders, with Rice in particular providing him with “a fierce tag-team partner,” even if choosing her would set off “red lights and screams” among Trump supporters. “This is no time to lay back, Joe” — so go bold.

Election watch: GOP’s Cry for Help

Republican senators are waging a “highly orchestrated, not remotely subtle . . . late, and desperate, campaign” to persuade President Trump to “adopt a more unifying message about how to resolve the country’s overlapping, ­excruciating crises,” writes RealClearPolitics’ A.B. Stoddard. From Chuck Grassley’s promoting a Wall Street Journal editorial that criticizes the president’s self-centered messaging to Lindsey Graham’s urging Trump to make the election “more about policy and less about your personality,” it’s a last-ditch attempt to save the president’s — and GOP senators’ — electoral chances. “Smart Republicans are watching the polls,” which show a majority of Americans “do not approve of the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic.” In light of Trump’s insistence that “I have to be myself,” though, their efforts to get Trump “to ease up on his self-destruction” are “likely doomed to fail.”

Conservative: Two Cheers for Our Symbols

At First Things, Gilbert Meilaender admits to having misgivings about overuse and “misuse” of the American flag and national anthem at mass events — “most especially those by well-known entertainers who seem to think that what matters is not the anthem but the performer.” Still, there is something to be said for such symbolic displays. They signify “simply that, whatever our differences on other matters both small and great, we acknowledge our shared history (both the good and the bad, in all its ambiguity), and we affirm our common bond of citizenship” — and remind us that “in defense of that shared bond some of our ancestors and contemporaries have risked their lives and in many cases given what Lincoln called ‘the last full measure of devotion.’  ”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board