Gates-Gate: Obama Shot Himself in the Foot
By Bronwyn's Harbor on July 27, 2009 at 11:40 PM in Current Affairs
Jennifer Rubin is a popular columnist among our writers and readers, especially Andy, and she’s been a special guest on Nocturnal Warrior’s Tuesday night radio show several times. Today, she hit one out of the park in her commentary, “Five Reasons Why ‘Gates-Gate’ Matters,” for Pajamas Media:
The president’s decision to weigh in on the arrest of his Harvard law professor friend Henry Louis Gates Jr., who mouthed off to a Cambridge cop threw a grenade into his health care PR offensive and revived questions about his promises of a post-racial presidency. He tried to defuse matters with a Friday appearance in the White House briefing room, but like his predecessor, he found it impossible to say “I am sorry” or “I was wrong.”
It is not surprising that the cable TV news and the Sunday talk shows continued to chew over the story. Unfortunately for the president, the comment was harmful on multiple levels. We can count at least five ways in which the story is a loser for Obama.
You’ll want to read her full post for her detailed reasoning on each, but I will list the “five ways” that Jennifer Rubin cites that make Gates-gate “a loser for Obama”:
- “First, it suggests he is an uninformed busy-body. With a paucity of facts and no evidence of racism, he chose to opine on a local matter which otherwise would never rise to the level of a presidential issue. …”
- “Second, he sucked the oxygen out of the health care debate at the very moment Democrats were pleading for him to become more involved. …”
- “Third, Obama indisputably fanned the flames of racism and rekindled animosity on both sides by assuming or making this all about race. …”
- “Fourth, the underlying fault line in Obama’s presidency and his agenda is the growing sense that government is getting too big and is accumulating too much power. … Obama, by meddling in a local matter and getting it all wrong, only fed the story line that he is out to boss us around, run our lives, and impose his left-wing perspective on every aspect of American life.”
- “Fifth, Obama has fallen into the unfortunate habit of blaming others. …”
Although I am decidedly not a fan of Dick Morris, he made a great point tonight on Hannity’s show when he observed that the phrases that Obama consistently uses about the health care reform package — “deficit neutral,” etc. — have ALL been poll-tested.
But Obama’s remarks about Gates-gate at the end of this week’s press conference hadn’t been poll-tested, and it showed. This was Obama flying solo in a test plane with no pre-flight ground check by his West Wing instructors — who feed him phrases they’ve pre-tested (preferably typed up on TOTUS) — and he crashed.
Obama also exposed a side of himself that he has apparently hidden (in order to make white voters feel comfortable in voting for him): His prejudice against whites, particularly white police officers who he had no hesitancy in labeling as behaving “stupidly.”
Imagine if a white president had described black or Hispanic policemen as behaving “stupidly.” The uproar would go on for weeks.
That is why the the third problem that Jennifer Rubin cites was most troubling to me: “Obama indisputably fanned the flames of racism and rekindled animosity on both sides by assuming or making this all about race.” She adds:
Juan Williams, on Fox News Sunday, did the country an immense service by recounting what exactly occurred: “The president spoke without the facts. You can’t have a ‘teachable moment’ if it’s based on a lie.” As Williams explained, in this case, the neighbor called the police, Gates began to berate the officer (“Do you know who I am?”), trash-talking about the officer’s mother and pursuing him out of the house. The black and Hispanic officers confirmed Gates’ abusive behavior, and Sergeant Crowley took out the handcuffs and warned Gates before finally having to cuff him.
Williams asked, “Is this an instance of a poor black kid being beaten by the cops?” No. And in converting this into a tale of police misconduct (he acted “stupidly” Obama said) and racial injustice, Obama only re-enforced the country’s racial divide. Whites often think blacks scream racism at the drop of a hat; blacks think whites are out to get them. Good work, Mr. President.
Thoughtful Americans of all colors and backgrounds want our nation to have better race relations. Gates-gate has set back progress in race relations with its unwarranted, uninformed accusations towards a police officer known for his progressive views on racial profiling.
Many of us who were critical of Barack Obama’s candidacy during the Democratic primaries, including writers for NoQuarterUSA.net, were stunned — shocked — when Obamabots accused us of racism. All the NoQuarter writers are very progressive in their views on race, class, sexual orientation, and more. The writers here simply felt that Obama didn’t have the experience, knowledge and history of hard work in government to be an effective president. I often said that, if he’d stayed in the U.S. Senate for two full terms and worked hard on his Senate committee assignments (which he did not during his short tenure), he’d then be presidential material. I also had a nagging suspicion that his closest associations (Rev. Wright, Rashid Khalidi, Bill Ayers, the Chicago machine, etc.) gave us undesirable information about him.
The MSM “meme” about Obama has been that he is “post-racial.” Sadly, this incident has shown that he harbors broad-stroke negative assumptions about his fellow white citizens, just as Henry Louis Gates demonstrated in his verbal assaults on Sgt. Crowley.
by Ronald Scott
* More novels by 
* 
(
)
- You'll have access to 18 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines, and books, as well as ultra-fast Web browsing with Amazon Silk -- faster than iPad. Full e-mail and document access and a keyboard. Fire can transmit what is on your screen onto a connected TV or monitor without an accessory. It runs Flash (iPad doesn't). 
