Former President Barack Obama discussed health care, immigration and faith during a joint appearance with German Chancellor Angela Merkel before a huge crowd in Berlin Thursday.
The former president did not mention President Donald Trump directly, in line with his desire not to get pulled into a political confrontation with his successor. But many of his remarks on immigration, health care and the threats to the international order and to human rights clearly spelled out a worldview that is at odds with that of the current president.
Obama warned Thursday that “progress” towards universal health care made during his presidency was in peril as Republicans try to repeal his signature domestic achievement.
“My hope was that I was able to get 100% of people health care while I was president. We didn’t quite achieve that, but we were able to get 20 million people health care who didn’t have health care,” he said.
“Certainly, I have some regrets,” he said, adding that he had hoped to do more.
“Obviously some of the progress that we made is now in peril … but the point really is for those 20 million people, their lives have been better,” Obama said. “We have set a standard that people can build on.”
Obama was appearing at the biennial congress of the German Protestant Church.
Thousands of people crowded in front of the Brandenburg Gate and down the green space known as the Tiergarten to see Obama and Merkel in a scene reminiscent of his 2008 campaign speech that he delivered at the Victory Column monument nearby.
Obama also addressed the question of refugees — hundreds of thousands of which have flowed into Germany from the Middle East and undocumented migrants, a key issue in the last US election that still roils American politics.
He said that as President he had faced a dilemma.
“In the eyes of God, a child on the other side of the border is no less worthy of love and compassion than my own child,” Obama said. “You can’t distinguish between them in terms of their worth or inherent dignity.”
But he also said that leaders like he and Merkel also had responsibilities to national constitutions, the rule of law and the people within their borders and had finite financial resources. He said more needed to be done for people in their own countries so they don’t want to leave.
“We can’t isolate ourselves. We can’t hide behind a wall,” Obama said.
Like Obama, Merkel spoke about how political change can sometimes come about more slowly than people wanted but argued that it required perseverance over a period of years to get things done.
Speaking a few yards away from the place where the Berlin Wall wound around the Brandenburg Gate as it divided the city between 1961 and 1989, Merkel held up her own experience growing up in the East, to show how even great political change is possible.
“For decades maybe, people laughed about there won’t be a German reunification — but it happened,” Merkel said.