Re-acting stupidly

WE SAY The President’s response is being over-analyzed.

The arrest of black professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. blew up when President Obama took a moment from talking about health care during a primetime news conference to comment.

Since then, the situation has generated a lot of talk. More recently, the talk has begun to tangentially spin off into obscure themes. Some commentators, having worn out the discussion of race, have begun to reinvent the topic. Others just want to turn this development, like every other, into whatever issue is important to them (surprisingly, Lou Dobbs managed not to make it about immigration).

Because of these analyses, it has become hard to even remember the roots of the discussion. Like a running joke that runs too far, we can’t remember how it began. By now, any clear understanding of the situation has been contrived.

All the quotes being put under the microscope and scrutinized by the news media (all the president’s controversy) seems to have come from a single response during a question and answer session: “I don’t know – not having been there and not seeing all the facts – what role race played in that, but I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.”

What’s interesting about Obama’s response is its sincerity. The response wasn’t scripted, hadn’t been run through a focus group. It was truly off-the-cuff. From this we get an interesting look into the thoughts of a man, not just a campaigning politician.

But we can over-analyze these thoughts. Surely Obama could have handled himself better. At one point, he smirked when recounting why, to his knowledge, professor Gates was arrested: “Professor Gates shows his ID that this is his house, and at that point he gets arrested for disorderly conduct.” But apparently he hadn’t heard that Gates insulted the officer’s mother.

This slipup is surprising only for a public that’s used to a perfectly articulate and charismatic Obama. Over the next four (or eight) years, he’s not going to say the right thing all the time. We shouldn’t dwell or look too deeply on a momentary lapse in judgment.