CharlesPaolino's Blog

PRESIDENT OBAMA

I’ve thought about this for a couple of days, and I can’t help feeling that President Obama, whose discretion I usually admire, should have stayed out of the controversy over the arrest of Henry Louis Gates. Twice listening to his remarks, made at a White House press conference, reinforced that opinion.

The overarching reason why the president should have kept his counsel because, juridically speaking, the matter is none of his business. It interested him because Gates is a friend of his and because there is a racial element to the controversy. But Obama can’t escape the fact that he is president, and the president should not interfere in local civil or criminal matters — friend or no friend, race or no race. The more particular reason why the president should have kept his counsel is that — to put it bluntly — he didn’t know what he was talking about, and he said so. How does he rationalize saying, on the one hand, that he didn’t know all the facts of the case and saying, on the other hand, that the police acted “stupidly”? I was also astounded that at that early stage of the case, the president — who, mark you, said he didn’t have all the facts — used the occasion to make a strong statement (certainly valid on its own merits) against racial profiling, when there had been no finding that racial profiling had played a part in this case. His remarks added heat to what was already an incendiary situation.

HENRY LOUIS GATES