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.
Moreover—and this is a point I haven’t seen others make—when Gates was shouting in the hearing of passerbys that Crowley was a racist, Crowley must have regarded this as a threat to his entire career. Allegations of racism could result in losing his job, being publicly disgraced, being unable to get another good job—the end of everything he’d worked for all his adult life.
Gates had much less to lose. His foolish mouthing off—in street talk, for goodness sake—at worst would get him a couple of hours in jail, as it did. That’s unpleasant, but even before being hauled off he could see a more-than-offsetting benefit: this could be the subject or the jumping off point for his next television documentary! Crowley had the power to put Gates in jail for a few hours, but not much else.
Gates, on the other hand, had the power to destroy Crowley’s career. And he seemed to enjoy wielding that power, or at least to be acting in reckless disregard of his capacity to destroy the professional life of another human being. Yes, Gates was jet-lagged and presumably irritated that he was locked out of his house. But the possibility that Crowley was a decent professional, not at all a racist, properly investigating a possible crime, doesn’t seem to have occurred to him. Crowley was just one of the little people, a disposable commodity in the career of an academic superstar.
I think this is one of the reasons the police union officials and Crowley’s colleagues on the Cambridge police force reacted so strongly and bravely (watch two of Crowley’s colleagues on the video in this Weekly Standard blogpost). They recognized that a Harvard swell was threatening to destroy one of their peers, and one whom they seem to genuinely admire, on a totally specious basis for his own fun and profit.
Did Obama sustain significant political damage from taking Gates’s side and stating that Crowley and his colleagues “acted stupidly”? The answer seems to me to be yes. Pollster Scott Rasmussen reports that only 30% of likely voters say Obama did an excellent or good job in answering the question at his press conference, while 44% say he did a fair or poor job. Moreover, Rasmussen reports, 69% of likely voters believe that American society is basically fair and decent, which 49% think Obama sees it as generally unfair and discriminatory—up from 41% last month.
In other words, by saying the Cambridge police “acted stupidly,” aligned himself with the culture of victimhood that Gates channeled when he faced Sergeant Crowley. And he aligned himself with a member of the academic elite who committed acts which threatened to destroy another person’s professional life. Not a pretty picture. It will be interesting to see who shows contrition after this afternoon’s beer session.
