The "why" seems very simple to me: presidents have friends, too. Presidents have race, as well. It would have been improper for him to intercede, but I'm not going to pass judgment on him commenting on a situation that strikes at him personally.
No, actually I am going to judge... and I find in favor of the defendant. I have to imagine that when friends of most former presidents had legal troubles and it was not politically necessary for the president to distance himself, they were handled through a more circumspect application of executive pull and not a public "Man, this is stupid."
But the issue here goes beyond one man being arrested, and merely resolving Professor Gates's case in his favor doesn't solve the problem.
(Especially as the charges were already dropped, as far as I know.)
So I applaud President Obama for not doing the "presidential" thing and, say, quietly torpedoing the career of the man who messed with his friend. That man had no idea he was arresting a man of import and influence for "Disorderly Conduct" (usually code words for "exercising one's first amendment right to tell the cops off"), but that's kind of the crux of the issue: would the officer have been so blase about pulling a white man out of a nice house adjacent to an Ivy League university in the middle of the night?
Of course, it really shouldn't matter whether one is a friend of the president or not... nobody should get arrested for telling off cops... but it's still worth asking if the encounter might have gone differently if the man who answered the door matched the officers' idea of what a distinguished Harvard scholar and man of influence should look like.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ninetydegrees
no subject
on 2009-07-29 05:57 am (UTC)No, actually I am going to judge... and I find in favor of the defendant. I have to imagine that when friends of most former presidents had legal troubles and it was not politically necessary for the president to distance himself, they were handled through a more circumspect application of executive pull and not a public "Man, this is stupid."
But the issue here goes beyond one man being arrested, and merely resolving Professor Gates's case in his favor doesn't solve the problem.
(Especially as the charges were already dropped, as far as I know.)
So I applaud President Obama for not doing the "presidential" thing and, say, quietly torpedoing the career of the man who messed with his friend. That man had no idea he was arresting a man of import and influence for "Disorderly Conduct" (usually code words for "exercising one's first amendment right to tell the cops off"), but that's kind of the crux of the issue: would the officer have been so blase about pulling a white man out of a nice house adjacent to an Ivy League university in the middle of the night?
Of course, it really shouldn't matter whether one is a friend of the president or not... nobody should get arrested for telling off cops... but it's still worth asking if the encounter might have gone differently if the man who answered the door matched the officers' idea of what a distinguished Harvard scholar and man of influence should look like.