A little bit of dispute over at the Washington Post. Chris Cillizza, proprietor of the political Fix blog, seems to think Barack Obama won’t take much of a political hit over his statement that the Cambridge police “acted stupidly” in the Henry Gates case. At least in the long run—though, reading between the lines, I sense that Tad Devine, who is usually careful not to contradict the party line, sounds worried that he might. Howard Kurtz, the Post’s media critic, seems a little more concerned; the experts he quotes seem to be saying that Obama seems to be an elitist, contemptuous of ordinary people.
Obama’s acolytes love to say that this case is a “teachable moment.” The one who needs teaching, it is clear, is not Sergeant James Crowley but Professor Henry Louis Gates. Gates proclaimed that he was being questioned because he was black—which was plainly not the case. Crowley was responding to a passerby’s report that a house was being broken into.
