'No higher compliment than being attacked by Obama': Tim Scott responds to Obama saying Republicans aren't serious about addressing racism

Republican presidential candidate Tim Scott responded to a string of criticisms from former President Barack Obama, telling host Shannon Bream, "There's no higher compliment than being attacked by President Obama," on Fox News Sunday.

After Scott appeared on talk show "The View" to combat the hosts' assertion that Scott doesn't really know what it is like to be a struggling black man in America, Obama indirectly took shots at the candidate regarding his views on race relations in the country.

“And so if a Republican, who may even be sincere in saying ‘I want us all to live together,’ doesn’t have a plan for how do we address crippling generational poverty that is a consequence of hundreds of years of racism in this society, and we need to do something about that. If that candidate is not willing to acknowledge that, again and again, we’ve seen discrimination in everything from … getting a job to buying a house to how the criminal justice system operates,” Obama said on the "The Axe Files," a CNN podcast with his former White House senior adviser David Axelrod.

“If somebody’s not proposing, both acknowledging and proposing, elements that say, ‘No, we can’t just ignore all that and pretend as if everything’s equal and fair. We actually have to walk the walk and not just talk the talk.’ If they’re not doing that, then I think people are rightly skeptical,” Obama added, according to The Hill.

Scott, who is currently polling around 3% among Republican candidates for the 2024 election, told Fox News that Obama is usually paraded out to disparage Republicans who are resonating with voters.

"Whenever the Democrats feel threatened, they drag out the former president and have him make some negative comments about someone running, hoping their numbers go down," Scott said. "Here is what people need to know. The truth of my life disproves the lies of the radical left," he added before reciting Republicans' contributions to historically black colleges and universities since 2016.

The senator also addressed the remarks in a radio interview with BlazeTV host Mark Levin on "The Mark Levin Show" and said that Obama failed at bringing the country together.

“[Obama] missed a softball moving at slow speed with a big bat. … You can’t miss this opportunity,” he said. "America was hungry for bringing our country together, this coalition-building, where you can see black kids and white kids and red ones and brown ones, as MLK spoke about, joining hands and singing with new meaning, ‘My country 'tis of thee,'" he continued.

President Obama however, said that he didn't think that any Republicans have been serious about addressing racism.

“There may come a time where there’s somebody in the Republican Party that is more serious about actually addressing some of the deep inequality that still exists in our society that tracks race and is a consequence of our racial history. And if that happens, I think that would be fantastic. I haven’t yet seen it."

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