Obama’s Cambridge Police Quote Ricochets
23 July 2009 9:08 am by Taylor Marsh
–updated–
As predicted, the topic exploding today is Pres. Obama’s statement about his friend Skip Gates and that the Cambridge police acted “stupidly.” It’s the last thing Obama wanted. From Ben Smith:
After spending most of an hour patiently reiterating his arguments for changing the health insurance system, President Barack Obama turned his press conference sharply toward an iconic moment in American race relations: The arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. earlier this week by the Cambridge Police.
Gates was arrested for allegedly disorderly conduct — a charge that was quickly dropped — after a confrontation with a police officer inside his own home. Though some facts of the case are still in dispute, Obama showed little doubt about who had been wronged.
Lynn Sweet was the reporter who asked the question of the night, which turned out to be way afield of health care, boring in on race and police profiling. Obama took it on directly, but as with much of last night, if he’d been on his game he’d never have gone as far as he did. There are many ways to say what Obama did without giving a headline to his haters. To add text, Obama could have just stuck with fact and truth, which wouldn’t distract:
“There’s a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.”
Paul Krugman is irritated at Howard Fineman, because he was unimpressed with Obama last night, though I didn’t know anyone still cared about Fineman’s opinion. Then Krugman pulls out one of Fineman’s typical beauties about George W. Bush, proving that even Nobel Prize winners can get seduced by a non sequitur.
UPDATE II: Dear Gibby, if you’re explaining yesterday, you’re losing today. On cue, a clarification on Gates:
The president does not regret anything he said last night about the Cambridge situation, said White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, emphasizing that Obama did not say that the police were stupid. The president said they acted “stupidly” in arresting Gates, a noted black scholar, attempting to enter his own home in Cambridge.
“Let me be clear,” Gibbs said. “He was not calling the officer stupid, okay? He was denoting that . . . at a certain point the situation got far out of hand, and I think all sides understand that.”
UPDATE: James Crowley, Policeman Who Arrested Gates, Won’t Apologize.
