On board Air Force One today, as the president headed for a health-care event in Cleveland, spokesman Robert Gibbs tried to pull back from the president’s declaration, at his news conference last night, that Cambridge, Massachusetts police “acted stupidly” in arresting Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates. Reporters wanted to know why the president, who admitted that he didn’t know all the facts of the matter, would so decisively declare that one side had acted “stupidly.” From today’s questioning:
QUESTION: Robert, some people thought it was a little unusual that the President waded into the matter between Professor Gates and the Cambridge police — a little uncharacteristic of him — when the facts are in dispute. You know, this is the sort of thing he might ordinarily say, I don’t — you know, I don’t know all the facts. Why do you —
GIBBS: Well, he did — let’s go through what he did say, because he did say, one, Professor Gates was a friend of his. He did say he didn’t have all the facts. I think we’ve all read in the newspaper at least a baseline of fact that the President outlined first by saying you have an unidentified individual who jimmies open a door of a house; the police are called based on that; the police respond — which you would expect a series of those events to transpire like that.
I think what the President ultimately talked about was, obviously there was a point at which, inside of the house, both parties involved, probably recognizing that the situation originally responded to wasn’t what was actually happening, in terms of a crime being committed, and at that point — at that point cooler heads on all sides should have prevailed. I think that’s what the President was denoting in the ultimate arrest and the since dropping of those charges.
QUESTION: Why do you think he wanted to weigh in on this, though? He obviously —
GIBBS: I appreciate your — I appreciate the ability at nationally televised news conferences to pass on questions like it was a game show. But I haven’t been afforded that — I don’t think the President has been afforded those possibilities before. But I will certainly pass along your suggestion.
QUESTION: But he did go so far as to say that the police behaved “stupidly?”
GIBBS: Well, again, I think — again, as I just said, I think there’s a point in this where it becomes clear that the situation as it was originally called in is not the current situation, right? At some point it becomes clear that the individual in the house owns the house. And I think that’s — at that point, cooler heads likely should have prevailed on both sides….
QUESTION: Has the President spoken to Professor Gates at all?
GIBBS: Not that I’m aware of, no.
QUESTION: Has anybody from the White House reached out to him?
GIBBS: Not that I’m aware of. Not that I’m aware of.
QUESTION: And when you say that cooler heads should have prevailed on all sides, you’re saying Professor Gates should have also handled it differently?
MR. GIBBS: Well, look, again, I wasn’t there, the President wasn’t there. I think at some point, again, you have a situation that is not as it — as not as it was called in. I think when somebody — I think being arrested in your own home for being in your home — I think the fact that those charges have been dropped denote that there clearly was a point at which this got far out of — far out of control.
QUESTION: But does he regret his use of language in saying “acting stupidly,” because online polls show lots of people of Massachusetts were disappointed that he used those words while acknowledging that he wasn’t in full possession of the facts.
MR. GIBBS: Again, I think if you look at the fact that a situation got as far out of control at a certain point as it did underscores the fact that things were going in a direction that neither wanted it to go in.
