I don’t usually get into the day to day kerfuffles which fill the airwaves these days but I did want to get something off my chest on the subject of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s run-in with the Cambridge police and President Obama’s hip-shot reaction to it.
Alice Roosevelt Longworth once said of her famous father, Theodore, “My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding, and the baby at every christening”. For good or ill, that’s the sort of person we elect to the presidency. The self-effacing Cal Coolidges, wary of the spotlight, are rare, indeed.
The modern version of Mrs. Longworth’s statement could add “…and have a well-formed opinion on every subject”. I might wish that President Obama had said “I don’t know. I’ll form my opinions when I’ve reviewed the facts of the incident more completely and will have a statement then.” He didn’t. He gave a hip-shot reaction to the effect that the officer had acted stupidly. Since then his statements on the subject, tempered by time and the emerging facts (not to mention public reactions) have begun to resemble something that I think nearly any reasonable person could agree with.
I can forgive him for ill-considered off-the-cuff remarks on minor matters, as this one most certainly is. However, it’s something of a bad habit for President Obama. I thought his initial remarks on the ousting of President Zelaya in Honduras and the post-election demonstrations in Iran had a similar flavor which evolved as they were polished into statements I could agree with.
That’s the kind of person we elect to the presidency these days and, if we don’t like it, we should stop demanding that presidents express themselves fluently and intelligently on every conceivable subject and stop electing those who appear as though they do.
Update
Mayor Daley weighs in in a similar vein:
President Obama should have gathered the facts first before commenting on Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s encounter with Cambridge, Mass. police, Mayor Daley said Saturday, wading into the controversy.
Daley said Obama — who has admitted he used a poor choice of words when he said Cambridge police acted “stupidly†by arresting Gates — should have known “you always have to have the facts†before responding to media questions.
This is the first genuinely dumb thing I’ve seen from Obama. A self-inflicted wound. Although he bailed out of it very well.
That said, he was right: the cop behaved stupidly, like a fired-up rookie. There’s no way an experienced cop actually believed Gates was a burglar. Which leaves the question of just what crime Gates was guilty of. Being pissy to a cop is not against the law.
It was a bad bust. Obama was right. But he should have stayed out of it.
I agree with you, Michael. In Cambridge of all places the police officer should have responded differently than he apparently did. I said as much on OTB Radio this week. However, intervening in the argument was an unforced error on Obama’s part.