Obama to activists: Hear hopefuls out

Black Lives Matter draws rebuke over campaign-trail demonstrations

President Barack Obama addresses a group of youth leaders Saturday at the Royal Horticultural Society in London.
President Barack Obama addresses a group of youth leaders Saturday at the Royal Horticultural Society in London.

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama chided the Black Lives Matter movement, which has disrupted Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's political events with rowdy protests, saying Saturday that its activists should set goals of sitting down with political leaders rather than "yelling at them."

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AP

British Prime Minister David Cameron and U.S. President Barack Obama get in a round of golf Saturday at the Grove Golf Course in Hertfordshire, England. The two leaders also held talks in London.

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AP

Police secure vantage points Saturday outside the Globe Theatre in London, where President Barack Obama attended a performance from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet on the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s death.

Speaking during a town-hall event for young people in London, Obama credited the group with shining a spotlight on police brutality, but he said activists generally should be willing to compromise once they've gotten attention from those who have power to make changes.

"You can't just keep on yelling at them, and you can't refuse to meet because that might compromise the purity of your position," Obama said as he discussed his experience as a community organizer.

Activists from the Black Lives Matter movement, which gained national attention amid police-brutality protests in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, have protested at several Clinton events. They got into a shouting match with former President Bill Clinton earlier this month. Activists from the group have also protested at rallies for Democratic candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and at events for Republican front-runner Donald Trump.

The group has protested Hillary Clinton's use of the term "super-predators" in the 1990s, as she pushed criminal-justice legislation that many believe helped to fuel a sharp rise in incarceration, particularly in minority-group communities. Some saw the term as racially charged language that targeted young people.

Obama, who is pushing for legislation that would roll back some of the harshest penalties, met with activists from the Black Lives Matter movement at the White House earlier this year.

He has largely backed the movement in previous comments, even as critics questioned its disruptive tactics such as blocking highways. The president's comments Saturday came as he is preparing to weigh in more forcefully in the presidential election, in which Clinton is the front-runner for the Democratic nomination.

If Clinton wins the nomination, she is expected to lean on Obama to boost her support among young black voters, who voted for the president by large margins but have thus far sided with Sanders.

After a protester confronted Clinton at a fundraiser earlier this year over her "super-predator" comment, the former secretary of state apologized for using the term.

In London, Obama called for the young activists to be more open to compromising with leaders with whom they disagree.

"Too often what I see is wonderful activism that highlights a problem, but then people feel so passionately and are so invested in the purity of their position that they never take that next step and say, 'How do I sit down and try to actually get something done?"' Obama said.

Obama's practice of calling on people by gender to ask questions during town halls, which he refers to as a "boy-girl-boy-girl" approach, ran into trouble Saturday when he shut down a questioner who tried to get his attention.

"Plus, it's a guy's turn also," Obama told the questioner, who later came out to the president as a nonbinary person.

After the town-hall event, Obama met privately with Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Britain's opposition Labor Party and supporter of the U.K. remaining in the European Union.

The town hall highlighted Obama's second full day in London, where he earlier met with Prime Minister David Cameron and urged Britons against voting in favor of a withdrawal from the EU.

Obama on Friday bluntly urged Britain to vote to remain inside the EU in a referendum scheduled for June 23, and warned that Britain outside the bloc could not count on maintaining its current economic relationship with the United States.

Taking an unusually direct position on another country's politics, Obama asserted that Britain's membership in the bloc did not limit British influence but "magnifies it."

Obama's comments at the news conference underlined his argument, made in an op-ed piece published Friday in The Daily Telegraph, that Britain is stronger and more influential inside the EU.

U.S. officials suggested that there was an internal debate about the wisdom of the straightforward article Obama wrote in The Telegraph, but they decided that it was better to be upfront about the president's views as he arrived in Britain.

Cameron, who is leading the campaign to stay in the EU, clearly favored a strong message from the president, whose position is shared by the leaders of Britain's main European allies, France and Germany.

Britain and France are the two strongest military powers in Europe, and Britain is the second-largest economy in the EU and fifth-largest in the world.

The economic risks of Britain's exit from the EU are important to British voters, but so are immigration and the inability of Britain to limit the number of EU citizens who want to live and work there. While studies show that the immigrants contribute considerably more to the British budget in taxes than they receive in benefits, there are worries that the immigrants are taking jobs away from Britons.

These arguments are likely to be more important than those about Britain's standing in the world or the country's relationship with the United States.

Obama was not asked about the referendum during Saturday's town hall.

Trade-pact push

Today, Obama is set to open the world's largest industrial fair in the northern German city of Hanover, leading a delegation of American companies hoping to conquer new markets abroad. He'll also be trying to complete one of his presidency's main pieces of unfinished business -- a trans-Atlantic trade pact.

Officials in Washington and Brussels are trying to clinch key parts of the deal before the end of the year, after which a new U.S. president and election campaigns in major European countries could complicate negotiations.

Proponents of the agreement -- known as the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP -- argue that lowering tariffs and harmonizing rules would give a much-needed boost to businesses at a time of global economic uncertainty. Or as Obama put it when the talks began three years ago: "New growth and jobs on both sides of the Atlantic."

But this view of the agreement hasn't caught the public's imagination, particularly in Germany.

More than 100,000 people protested in Berlin in November against the proposed pact. On Saturday, police estimated about 35,000 marched against it in Hanover, carrying placards with slogans such as "Yes We Can -- Stop TTIP!" Organizers put the turnout at 90,000.

Trade unions, nationalists and green groups have lobbied hard against the deal, saying it will drive down wages and erode consumer protection and environmental standards.

The discussions, due to resume Monday in New York, have come under criticism for the secretive manner in which they've been conducted. National lawmakers are only allowed to view draft documents in special reading rooms and are forbidden from talking about the documents with experts, the media or their constituents.

Proposals to create dispute-settlement tribunals have also stoked fears.

EU trade chief Cecilia Malmstrom envisages special investment courts that would rule in disputes between governments and companies that feel they face undue legal hurdles to their businesses.

Critics say such courts could place the interests of corporations above those of democratically elected governments, citing a recent case in which tobacco giant Philip Morris sued Uruguay over a law requiring graphic warnings on cigarette packages.

Alfred de Zayas, a U.S. law professor and United Nations human-rights expert, argues that such courts are unnecessary in countries that abide by the rule of law, such as the United States or the EU's 28 nations.

Backers of the special courts say they would prevent cases from being heard by American jurors who don't understand the complexities of international trade law, and ensure that U.S. companies don't face discrimination in European countries with high rates of corruption.

Juergen Hardt, a German lawmaker and the government's coordinator for trans-Atlantic cooperation, said he believes that some of those leading the fight against the agreement "have other motivations" beyond trade.

"They also want to incite anti-American feelings," he said.

Information for this article was contributed by Michael D. Shear and Steven Erlanger of The New York Times; by Toluse Olorunnipa and Justin Sink of Bloomberg News; and by Frank Jordans of The Associated Press.

A Section on 04/24/2016

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