Barack Obama n’est pas Charlie — or at least, he wasn’t this weekend.
Don’t look for the president or vice president among the photos of 44 heads of state who locked arms and marched down Boulevard Voltaire in Paris. Nor did they join a companion march the French Embassy organized in Washington on Sunday afternoon.
Indeed, Obama’s public reactions to the attacks in Paris last week have been muted. His initial response Wednesday to the killing of 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper offices was delivered as he sat calmly in an armchair in the Oval Office speaking about the “cowardly” acts and defending freedom of the press. Two days later, as a gunman took hostages and went on to kill four people in a kosher grocery, Obama took a few seconds away from a community college proposal roll-out in Tennessee because he said with events unfolding, “I wanted to make sure to comment on them” — but never then or afterward specifically condemned that attack.
Obama wasn’t far from the march in D.C. on Sunday that wended silently along six blocks from the Newseum to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial. Instead, he spent the chilly afternoon a few blocks away at the White House, with no public schedule, no outings.
Joe Biden was back home in Wilmington, Delaware.
Neither they nor any high-level administration official attended either event.
France’s top American diplomat, diplomatically, tried to make the best of it. » | Edward-Isaac Dovere | Sunday, January 11, 2015
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