GOP Sees Opportunity With White Voters After Gates Saga
Obama's Response to Professor's Arrest Dents Numbers Among Swing Voters By David Weigel
Two weeks after President Obama said that Cambridge, Mass., police had "acted stupidly" by arresting Harvard University Prof. Henry Louis Gates for arguing with them inside his home, Republicans are still taking stock of their unexpected political gift.
A Pew Research poll released on July 30 found the president's approval rating among white voters slipping seven points, from 53 percent to 46 percent, explicitly because of their disappointment in the Gates remarks. A CNN/Opinion Research poll released on August 4 found that six out of 10 white voters disagreed with the president's remarks. A Quinnipiac poll released on August 6 found that white voters, by a 2-1 margin, believed that the president had "acted stupidly" in talking about Gates.
"He would have been a whole lot wiser to shut up," said Roy Fletcher, a Republican strategist based in Baton Rouge, La. "He got really close to losing the image he has as a post-racial president. For a few days, the question for a lot of people became, 'Wait a minute. Is he the president of the United States? Or is he just the president of minorities?' And that was a really unfortunate thing."
Being President of minorities instead of President of real Americans! Yeah, that was a real "forgetting his place" moment.
Sure it's a GOP operative, but those types have Versailles wired. And, indeed, Obama should have known what a straight-jacket the whole "post-racial" posture was. But he compounded it by not treating it as a teachable moment, and instead treating it as a photo-op. Once he opened the can of worms, he should have realized he had no choice but to go fishing for something bigger.
What could have been taught? Quite a lot, actually, starting with something seemingly quite small. To begin with, he could have taught the reason why he reacted as he did. And he could have bilt up from there. He could have said something like this:
"Much as we strive to be one nation, we still have very different experiences. Most white professionals never have any contact with the police, beyond an occasional traffic ticket. But most black professionals do have contact, and it usually involves some questioning of their right to be wherever they happen to be....
The arrest of Henry Louis Gates, and all that has followed it provides countless different angles to explore, but I want to just focus attention on the following. First is the little-known fact that this wasn't an isolated incident. There's a persistent problem with blacks at Harvard suffering from police harrassment. From the Boston Globe last August: (H/T Jesse Taylor at Pandagon)
It was the quintessential college scene: dozens of students from the Harvard Black Men's Forum and the Association of Black Harvard Women picnicking on the Radcliffe Quad, playing capture-the-flag and running relay races at their end-of-the-year field day.
But just an hour into the festivities on the sunny afternoon in May 2007, the fun screeched to a halt. Two campus police officers rode up on motorcycles. Were they students, the officers asked. Did they have permission to be there?
The young men and women, dressed in Harvard T-shirts, would discover that a fellow student in a nearby dorm had mistaken them for trespassers, according to students who were there and whose account was confirmed by Harvard officials.
The incident, which ignited criticism from black students and faculty, highlighted the prejudices that many black students say they continue to face at Harvard, not only from police, but from classmates, as well.
More from that article on the flip, including some brief descriptions of other such incidents.
Second, is the fact that Obama's initial response was refreshingly honest and real: For the police to arrest someone in their own home, just because the person is upset? Calling it "stupidity" is kind.
But, third, that momentary honesty doesn't really accomplish anything, beyond giving us a rush. That's why I--someone who's generally infuriated by the walk-back routine--am actually quite pleased with Obama's followup. The fact is, Gates may very well have been wrong about the officer--but only because the most widespread problem we face today is "Racism Without Racists" (aka "colorblind racism"--see the book by the same name by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva here.), the persistence of subconscious racial attitudes that have a pervasive, pernicious impact on black, Latino and other minorities' lives, without any conscious animosity on the part of whites who harbor such attitudes. And anything that helps us make some headway in sorting through the deceptive intricacies of colorblind racism is a good thing.
Fourth, special bonus points for outing the plain old-fashioned racism that still lurks in many parts of the GOP/conservative establishment, trying to exploit the persistence of colorblind racism. (See, for example, "Gates arrest: GOP congressman still on political warpath.") As Obama's sudden shift in tone struck a chord with the police involved in the incident, and presumably with many millions more white Americans, the hatred-fanning GOP/conservative dinosaurs were caught flat-footed. And that's a very good thing, indeed.
STATE BLOGS
