Remember the last guy who couldn’t recall a mistake? How about this guy, who catches them as they happens and rectifies it as soon as he can.
WASHINGTON — Trying to tamp down an uproar over race, President Barack Obama said Friday he used an unfortunate choice of words in commenting on the arrest of black scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. and could have “calibrated those words differently.”
The president said he had telephoned the white policeman who arrested Gates, and he said the conversation confirmed his belief that the officer was a good man and an outstanding officer.
The president caused a stir when he said at a prime-time news conference earlier this week that Cambridge, Mass., police had “acted stupidly” by arresting Gates, a friend of the president’s, for disorderly conduct.On Friday, Obama made an impromptu appearance at the daily White House briefing in an effort to contain the controversy.
“This has been ratcheting up, and I obviously helped to contribute ratcheting it up,” he said. “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 and Sgt. Crowley specifically. And I could’ve calibrated those words differently.”
Obama suggested the whole incident could be worked out over a drink. “There was discussion about he and I and Professor Gates having a beer here in the White House. We don’t know if that is scheduled yet, but we may put that together.”
He said he continued to believe that the both the officer, Sgt. James Crowley, and Gates had overreacted during the incident, but the president also faulted his own comments.
Let’s track this properly.
After the officer in question basically said “I didn’t vote for him and I don’t care what he says,” the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES calls him, realizes he might have misspoke, and invites the two parties to the white house for a beer.
Everybody freaking out about this, on both sides, needs to shut up now.
I can pull myself off the Comic Con floor long enough to say “Class act.”
