Politico: Obama Stepped In It
From Politico ~ President Barack Obama has strained through his career in national politics to embrace nuance in all things, and never more than when the subject is race. But an off-the-cuff remark at the end of a news conference designed to further his health care agenda put him at the center of a familiar public melodrama of white cop and black victim in which big-city mayors — never mind presidents — tread with the greatest of caution.
The White House spent Thursday trying to both defend Obama’s words and to soften his position from the night before, when the president departed from his talking points, aides said, to express authentic disgust at the arrest of a black Harvard professor in his own home.
Press secretary Robert Gibbs stood by Obama’s statement that a Cambridge police officer, James Crowley, had acted “stupidly” in arresting Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. but added some implicit criticism of Gates’s conduct, suggesting “both sides” bear blame for the incident. Obama, who said that he was “surprised by the controversy,” said he wished that “cooler heads” had prevailed and described Crowley as an “outstanding” officer.
Police organizations attacked the president’s willingness to criticize a police officer without knowing all the facts, Republicans dusted off law-and-order attacks largely absent from the presidential campaign and everyone from comedian Bill Cosby to the Irish-American media piled on.
Meanwhile, critics of police brutality praised Obama, and the Rev. Al Sharpton went so far as to tell POLITICO the words showed that the president is not really “post-racial.”
The strident accusations left little space for the nuances that this president would more typically explore: that the black man, Gates, was a distinguished professor with little appetite for public confrontation; and that the police officer was a police academy instructor in race relations best known for giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a dying black NBA star.
Many observers — even those who agreed with the substance of Obama’s remarks — thought he’d committed a political error in departing from a carefully crafted image.
“He can’t break character now,” said Michael Fauntroy, a public policy professor at George Mason University. “The character that America bought was a race-neutral guy who wasn’t going to mention race in any meaningful way.”
Others objected to his decision to comment without knowing all the details. “I’ve heard about five different reports,” Cosby said in a Boston radio interview. “If I’m the president of the United States, I don’t care how much pressure people want to put on it about race, I’m keeping my mouth shut. I was shocked to hear the president making this kind of statement,” Cosby said.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/25356.html#ixzz0MBdQbmTz.
The White House spent Thursday trying to both defend Obama’s words and to soften his position from the night before, when the president departed from his talking points, aides said, to express authentic disgust at the arrest of a black Harvard professor in his own home.
Press secretary Robert Gibbs stood by Obama’s statement that a Cambridge police officer, James Crowley, had acted “stupidly” in arresting Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. but added some implicit criticism of Gates’s conduct, suggesting “both sides” bear blame for the incident. Obama, who said that he was “surprised by the controversy,” said he wished that “cooler heads” had prevailed and described Crowley as an “outstanding” officer.
Police organizations attacked the president’s willingness to criticize a police officer without knowing all the facts, Republicans dusted off law-and-order attacks largely absent from the presidential campaign and everyone from comedian Bill Cosby to the Irish-American media piled on.
Meanwhile, critics of police brutality praised Obama, and the Rev. Al Sharpton went so far as to tell POLITICO the words showed that the president is not really “post-racial.”
The strident accusations left little space for the nuances that this president would more typically explore: that the black man, Gates, was a distinguished professor with little appetite for public confrontation; and that the police officer was a police academy instructor in race relations best known for giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a dying black NBA star.
Many observers — even those who agreed with the substance of Obama’s remarks — thought he’d committed a political error in departing from a carefully crafted image.
“He can’t break character now,” said Michael Fauntroy, a public policy professor at George Mason University. “The character that America bought was a race-neutral guy who wasn’t going to mention race in any meaningful way.”
Others objected to his decision to comment without knowing all the details. “I’ve heard about five different reports,” Cosby said in a Boston radio interview. “If I’m the president of the United States, I don’t care how much pressure people want to put on it about race, I’m keeping my mouth shut. I was shocked to hear the president making this kind of statement,” Cosby said.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/25356.html#ixzz0MBdQbmTz.
Labels: Barack Obama, Gates' Arrest
posted by Mike McCarville @ 9:21 AM
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