Obama’s Race-Colored Glasses

Barack Obama may want to take note of the fact that his approval rating fell to 48 percent today according to a Zogby poll. If a Massachusetts union is blind with rage at a Democrat a mere eight months into his presidency, it may be time to yank him from the TV circuit for a little while. The uber-charismatic Kennedy-esque Messiah is his own worst enemy. Who’d have guessed it?

After judging that Cambridge Police Sargeant James Crowley acted “stupidly” when he arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, Obama made a surprise guest appearance at the White House press briefing the other day in an attempt to tranquilize the situation. Among the usual Hope and Change rhetoric about Gates and Crowley being exceptionally decent people, Obama made the following observation: “My hope is that as a consequence of this event, this ends up being what’s called a teachable moment where all of us, instead of pumping up the volume, spend a little more time listening to each other and try to focus on how we can generally improve relations between police officers and minority communities … The fact that this has become such a big issue, I think, is indicative of the fact that race is still a troubling aspect of our society.”

There’s a psychological malady that describes what the president is doing: projection. Having admitted to not being familiar with all the details of the arrest, Obama judged Gatesgate solely through a racial lens. A white cop arrested a black civil rights leader, which by its very nature is a racist act. Calling Crowley’s actions “stupid” was based on a worn stereotype in which African Americans are constantly targeted by bigoted police. Obama reinforced this on Wednesday when he quipped that he would have been shot by police if he’d been caught breaking into his own house.

Having been roundly rebuked for his thinking, Obama blamed lingering racist sentiments and called on us to help integrate police and minorities. But for the rest of us, this was never a racial issue. The color of Gates’ skin was not the point.

It wasn’t about race for Sargeant James Crowley, who responded to a routine 911 call and, after being confronted with insults by the owner of the house he sought to protect, made a standard disorderly conduct arrest. Crowley serves alongside several black officers and Cambridge’s population is 12 percent African American, so Gates’ doorstep would be a strange place for Crowley’s apparently dormant racism to suddenly boil out of control.

It wasn’t about race for the Cambridge Police Department, which held a press conference demanding an apology from Obama. Several black officers stood somberly with their white brothers behind the podium.

It wasn’t about race for the unidentified 911 caller, who was implicated herself in this racemongering. According to the released dispatch, when asked to describe the suspect, the caller said she thought one of the alleged thieves might be Hispanic, but had only caught a glimpse of the backs of the men’s heads. She has since expressed anger that Gates’ narrative of the arrest implied that she had made the call because the suspects were black.

It wasn’t about race for Crowley’s fellow Cambridge officers, who circled the wagons after Gates and Obama attacked. Leon Lashley, a black police sargeant who served with Crowley, emphatically told CNN that the arrest had nothing to do with race. Kelly King, another African American with the Cambridge police, agreed and pledged to never vote for Obama again.

It wasn’t about race for Bill Cosby, who said he was “shocked” after he heard Obama’s comment about Crowley and declared, “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.”

It wasn’t about race for countless pundits and commentators, who have contributed to a healthy discussion of this issue without using Obama’s uninformed racial reasoning.

It wasn’t about race for the American people, who have sent Obama’s poll numbers into freefall since the Gates flap.

There are currently only two people in the known world who saw this arrest as a racial issue: Henry Louis Gates and Barack Obama. Others have used the issue to speculate about abusive police powers or wonder if disorderly conduct laws are too punitive. These are both debates worth considering. But only Barack Obama, whose memoir centered on race despite formative years spent in integrated Hawaii, who has commented that he liked his name because it didn’t endear him to white people, who once remarked during the campaign that he constantly had trouble hailing a cab in New York because he was black, thinks this incident cries out for racial healing.

Here’s video of Crowley’s fellow cops taking Obama to task: