Obama says he 'will consider it a personal insult' if black voters don't turn out for Clinton


President Obama had strong words of exhortation and critique for black voters and Republican nominee Donald Trump, respectively, while speaking at a Congressional Black Caucus Foundation event Saturday evening.
"I will consider it a personal insult and an insult to my legacy if this community lets down its guard and fails to activate itself in this election," he said, adding in a plug for Democrat Hillary Clinton, "My name may not be on the ballot, but our progress is on the ballot. Tolerance is on the ballot. Democracy is on the ballot. Justice is on the ballot. Good schools are on the ballot. Ending mass incarceration, that's on the ballot right now."
Turning to Trump, Obama wryly joked about the birther controversy Trump helped fuel. He also alluded to the candidate's suggestion "that there's never been a worse time to be a black person," positing that Trump must have "missed that whole civics lesson about slavery or Jim Crow."
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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