“If you’ve got to do a job, do it yourself,” Obama said. (ap)
The White House didn’t want to risk heading into the weekend news cycle with the Gates thing still fulminating, so President Obama got on the phone with Sgt. Jim Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department, and the two of them are going to have a beer with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
“And because this has been ratcheting up — and I obviously helped to contribute ratcheting it up — I want to make clear that in my choice of words I think I unfortunately gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department or Sergeant Crowley specifically — and I could have calibrated those words differently,” Obama said. “And I told this to Sergeant Crowley.”
Obama said he still believes the police overreacted in arresting Gates, and that Gates also overreacted. He said it was “unfortunate” that his own words Wednesday night contributed to the “media frenzy” surrounding the incident. He called this a “teachable moment,” but if he apologized to Crowley for saying the Cambridge police “acted stupidly,” he didn’t mention it.
Crowley “also did say he wanted to find out if there was a way of getting the press off his lawn,” Obama said. “I informed him that I can’t get the press off my lawn. He pointed out that my lawn is bigger than his lawn. But if anybody has any connections to the Boston press, as well as national press, Sergeant Crowley would be happy for you to stop trampling his grass.”
