http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-gates-analysis24-2009jul24,0,2990550.storyFrom the Los Angeles Times
President Obama steps squarely into racial politics
He has been cautious in addressing race-related matters. By staunchly supporting friend Henry Louis Gates Jr., arrested in Cambridge, Mass., he take sides in a highly charged racial controversy.
By Peter Wallsten
July 23, 2009
Reporting from Washington — By inserting himself Wednesday night into the case of an arrested Harvard University professor, President Obama made the most overt step of his tenure into the nation's racial politics. The measured and cautious Obama that Americans have come to know might have demurred when, at the end of his prime-time press conference, he was asked about the arrest last week of Henry Louis Gates Jr., a prominent African American-studies scholar and friend of the president's. But Obama was surprisingly emotive and unequivocal when answering the question and concluding that the Cambridge, Mass., police had "acted stupidly" in arresting Gates, who is black, after he tried to pry open a stuck door to gain entry to his own home.
Obama said he did not know what role if any race played in the matter. But he also seemed to welcome the opportunity to teach a larger racial lesson. Obama used the question to recall his sponsorship as an Illinois state legislator of legislation to crack down on racial profiling, noting that "there is a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped" disproportionately by police.
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With his comments, the country's first black president all but ensured wider attention to the simmering racial dispute -- and also risked overshadowing the main purpose of his press conference, which was to drain controversy from his ambitious plans to overhaul the U.S. healthcare system. The president's foray into the Gates episode was surprising for a number of other reasons, most notably because he had so carefully sought to avoid racially charged topics that might have made some voters uncomfortable with electing an African American to the White House.
As a candidate, Obama defused the Jeremiah Wright controversy -- the firestorm over anti-American remarks by his ex-pastor -- by delivering a widely praised speech on race that was viewed as sensitive to all sides, including whites fed up with policies such as racial preferences. During the campaign, he said affirmative action should be applied on the basis of class and need, not on the basis of race. Obama also initially was cautious during his candidacy when the Jena Six case took the national spotlight. Black leaders were outraged that Louisiana officials had charged six black teenagers with attempted murder, rather than a lesser offense, in the beating of a white student. The 2006 incident followed months of racial unrest in Jenna, La., after white students hung nooses from a tree traditionally used by whites at the high school after black students sought permission to sit beneath it.
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Obama's willingness to step into the Gates controversy was surprising, too, because some facts in the case remain in dispute. It also potentially puts him at odds with police officers across the country who could rally around the cause of the Cambridge officer, Sgt. James Crowley... It was an unusually certain statement for a president who has flaunted his deliberative, open-minded style of leadership. Asked in March why it took him several days to express outrage over bonuses awarded to employees of the bailed-out insurance giant AIG, Obama fired back: "It took us a couple of days because I like to know what I'm talking about before I speak."
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