July 24, 2009
-
“…the Cambridge Police acted stupidly…”
if President Obama says those words before November 7, 2008, John McCain would be our president and Sarah Palin would be the vice-president.
obama was elected because he got support from all groups, black or not. he very carefully and strategically avoided all issues that required him to answer as “the black candidate”. he answered almost all questions as a race-neutral candidate. he was someone sensitive to race, but not beholden to it. and it’s because he positioned himself as the truly post-race candidate that he won the support of millions of non-black voters, and rode that support to the presidency.
but this statement about the Cambridge Police… this statement made before all sides were heard, puts him squarely on the black side in the black vs white fight, a fight that he so cautiously avoided until now. if he makes this statement as a candidate, the black voters would have supported him before his Iowa primary victory, the turning point, but the white voters would have started looking elsewhere, imo.
it’s a curious thing to witness, like Icarus losing his wings. this transcendant figure who was the first minority candidate to ever successfully position himself as a post-race minority, just dropped himself into the realm of mortals.
UPDATE:
now this is more like the candidate we elected.“My sense is you’ve got two good people in a circumstance in which neither of them were able to resolve the incident in the way that it should have been resolved and the way they would have liked it to be resolved.”
nice and neutral. and a total about-face, backtrack of what he actually said on wednesday.
Comments (12)
Of all the stupid things this administration has supported. Things that the polls tell us are very unpopular. We see his approval numbers crash right after this comment. I would like to think it was just a straw that made people think. That is what I would like to think . . .
Biden’s gaffs are at least funny – Obama’s are just a sad testament to how racially retarded our nation remains.
No one would listen when he threw Jeremiah Wright under the bus…
Thank you, that’s exactly what I thought. He first admits that he doesn’t have all the facts and then stooped to throw down that race card. Uh, hello, Mr. President–if you don’t know the facts, shut up. Instead of automatically presuming this was a racial issue.
@Irish_Russian -
actually, i think dumping Jeremiah Wright was an example of race-neutral Obama, as opposed to the Obama of Wednesday’s press conference. he dumped Wright because Wright was injecting too much “white man keeping the black man down” rhetoric into the conversation of the Obama candidacy, something the campaign didn’t like and specifically asked him not to do. it’s that Obama that won the presidency, not the one that jumped into a local street fight.
@RedHairedCelt -
i wouldn’t call obama’s statement “playing the race card” really, which is something i usually associate with trying to take advantage of race. but i do take his statement as a show of support to the arrested professor and the professor’s newfound crusade against racial profiling stemming from this incident, an incident that i’m sure obama had not heard both sides to before he commented. it’s that rashness, i think, that sinks obama to “black candidate” levels. he chose black before all the facts were in.
yes. i completely agree that it was a foolish and unnecessary comment. the police officer was obviously pretty stupid in arresting the professor and bringing him to jail, and i mean, policemen aren’t known for being intelligent. i mean, IT’S HIS FUCKING HOUSE. leave him alone in it. gates also likely overreacted and made this a bigger issue. the police wouldn’t have detained him if he just SHUT THE FUCK UP. the nytimes had a good article with different academics weighing in on the situation.
both sides were stupid, but back to the point, the cops acted stupidly. they did. but so did gates. and it was foolish of obama to take sides.
@MiracleMax - Exactly, someone had to tell him to do that, after he willingly sat in this man’s church, listening to him spout racial hate, for 20 years.
@synaesthetics -
in the policeman’s defense, Gates wasn’t arrested for breaking and entering. he was arrested for disorderly conduct. stupid would be arresting an small, old man for B&E. a disorderly conduct arrest sounds to me like an arrest for whatever transpired after the cop knew there was no B&E, i.e. Gates’ carrying on.
@MiracleMax -
yeah i know Gates wasn’t arrested for breaking and entering. he was arrested for carrying on and shit. which i still think is PRETTY FUCKING STUPID considering the cop just insulted him for thinking that Gates just broke into his own fucking house. wouldn’t you be pissed if a cop was like, someone claims you broke into this residence, can i see some proof that you live here? i’d be pretty insulted, and i don’t even live in that nice of a neighborhood. i’m not black, nor do i have any of the psychic baggage of being black in america. and that shit is real. you don’t enslave a population for generations without leaving marks. koreans had to deal with japanese abuse for what, 60 years, and koreans HATE the japanese. HATE. imagine that carried out over 4-500 years.
white people just think it’s water under the bridge. and that’s their problem. black people, they carry on like slavery ended yesterday. and that’s their problem. it’s why this sort of shit happens. and obama should NEVER have gotten involved in any way in this. that was SO DUMB from a guy who’s usually remarkably savvy about this shit.
@RedHairedCelt -
this IS a race issue.
do you think a white professor would
a) be hassled in cambridge while trying to break into his own residence? do you think that the neighbor would have called in the police, and do you think the police would be aggressive in asking for proof of residence?
b) act up and act out the way that Gates did, to cause the disconduct arrest? do you think black people have the same relationship with the police that white people do?
i don’t know you, but i’m going to be blunt. race is still an issue in america. not as much of an issue as it used to be, but it’s not dead yet. this was a race thing. the new and interesting wrinkle is that this police overreaction happened to a highly respected upper-middle class Harvard professor, and not some janitor in bed-stuy. because no one would give a fuck if it were the janitor in bed-stuy. because it happens to those fuckers all the time.
i think obama just said something that was exactly on his mind. it wasn’t the wisest thing to say from an image standpoint, but i think he just spoke both off the cuff and from the heart. i agree with synaesthetics — “we are now post-racial” stuff that some of the media has been throwing around is bullshit. race is still an issue in this country.
and on a side note, Gates was probably acting like a douche, pulling the “do you KNOW who I am??!” stunt, but he still shouldn’t've been arrested.
Picked up a bottle of Singleton 12 this weekend… I’d never seen it or tried it, and it was $35. Pretty good man. If you see it, pick up a bottle.