From pollster Scott Rasmussen comes evidence that Barack Obama’s comment that the Cambridge police “acted stupidly” in the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates has had some political cost. Rasmussen reports that 26% of likely voters think Obama’s response to Lynn Sweet’s press conference question was excellent or good, while 46% rated it as poor. There was a clear racial divide in the responses: blacks considered it excellent or good as opposed to poor by a 71% to 5% margin; whites considered it poor as opposed to excellent or good by a 53% to 22% margin.
In addition, the press conference seems to have increased strong opposition to Obama. Before Obama’s comments, Rasmussen reported that 29% strongly approved Obama’s performance as president, while 36% strongly disapproved. These results were reported on July 23, the day after the press conference; they represent responses received from July 20 to 22, in which only a few if any respondents would have heard Obama’s response to Sweet’s question at about 9 p.m. Eastern time July 22. Rasmussen’s results reported today, July 26, of interviews conducted between July 23 to 25, show 29% strongly approving Obama’s performance and 40% disapproving. You might argue that the upward spike from 36% to 40% strong disapproval is statistically insignificant, but it looks ominous to me.
Obama campaigned as a post-racial candidate, one who would lead America in a future in which we could put racial discord behind us. His insistence on saying that the Cambridge police “acted stupidly” undermined that appeal. He sounded more like (though not exactly like) Al Sharpton and less like the Barack Obama who first came to our attention in that 17-minute speech to the Democratic National Convention. If I had been advising Obama, I would have advised him to note, as he did, that he didn’t know all the facts and that Gates is a friend of his, and then to say that it seemed like an unhappy situation. Then he wouldn’t have had to come to the White House press room on Friday, a couple of hours after the Massachusetts police union leaders demanded an apology, and make his almost-but-not-quite apology which leaves open some embarrasing questions (was Gates pulled out of his house, as Obama said?). This is not what Americans had in mind when they elected him president.
