World leaders must heed people’s economic fears, Obama says

Associated Press

ATHENS, GREECE

Drawing a broad lesson from the election of Donald Trump, President Barack Obama said Tuesday that world leaders need to pay attention to people’s very real fears of economic dislocation and inequality in the midst of globalization.

“The more aggressively and effectively we deal with those issues, the less those fears may channel themselves into counterproductive approaches that can pit people against each other,” Obama said as he opened the last foreign tour of his presidency.

Obama, in a joint news conference with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, said that both Trump’s election and the British vote to leave the European Union reflected the need to deal with “people’s fears that their children won’t do as well as they have.”

“Sometimes people just feel as if we want to try something and see if we can shake things up,” Obama said.

The president seemed skeptical that “the new prescriptions being offered” would satisfy the frustrations and anger evident in election. And he played a bit of defense, saying that his agenda over past eight years had dealt with economic issues head-on and “the country’s indisputably better off.”

Obama’s diagnosis of what went wrong for Hillary Clinton and Democrats offered little in the way of a road map for Democrats to avoid a similar fate in future elections. Democrats reeling from their resounding defeat last week are divided about what went wrong and even more divided about how to fix it.