The Good Citizen's Reward

While the President serves beer to Henry Louis Gates and James Crowley in the White House today, Lucia Whalen will be at work in Cambridge, pondering the lessons of her phone call to the police last week.

In the aftermath of Barack Obama's gaffe in saying the police acted "stupidly," the White House is smoothing over the ensuing national rancor with a photo-op reconciliation for the principals in the confrontation without acknowledging the abuse that has been heaped on Ms. Whalen as a racist.

"If you're a concerned citizen," she told reporters yesterday, "you should do the right thing if you're seeing something that seems suspicious. I would do the same thing."

The tape of her call reveals she told the dispatcher she had “no idea” if two men were breaking into the house, repeatedly suggesting they might live there. She did not mention the men’s race until a dispatcher asked if they were black, white or Hispanic.

“There were two larger men,” she says in the tape. “One looked kind of Hispanic, but I’m not really sure,” adding that she did not see what the second man “looked like at all.”

Ms. Whalen also told the dispatcher she was calling 911 on her cell phone at the request of an elderly neighbor who saw the men trying to get into the house.

After becoming a "a target of scorn and of ridicule because of the things I never said, " Ms. Whalen has the satisfaction of having done the right thing while the three principals in Gatesgate now bond and congratulate themselves for overcoming their own questionable actions in the affair.

She probably is not much of a beer drinker anyway.

Damage Controller-in-Chief

Nobody ever accused the President of being a slow learner.

"President Obama tried Friday," says the New York Times, "to defuse a volatile national debate over the arrest of a black Harvard University professor as he acknowledged that his own comments had inflamed tensions and insisted he had not meant to malign the arresting officer.

"Mr. Obama placed calls to both the professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and the man who arrested him, Sgt. James Crowley, two days after saying the police had 'acted stupidly' last week in hauling Professor Gates from his home in handcuffs. Mr. Obama said he still considered the arrest 'an overreaction,' but added that 'Professor Gates probably overreacted as well.'

“'I obviously helped to contribute ratcheting it up,' the president said in an appearance in the White House briefing room. '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 or Sergeant Crowley specifically, and I could have calibrated those words differently.'"

Now can we get back to talking about health care reform?

Update: Now Professor Gates thanks the President for his support and ducks behind an elder statesman of the civil rights movement to suggest a larger meaning for his rowdy behavior:

"It was very kind of the President to phone me today. Vernon Jordan is absolutely correct: my unfortunate experience will only have a larger meaning if we can all use this to diminish racial profiling and to enhance fairness and equity in the criminal justice system for poor people and for people of color."

Kumbaya and to all, a good night.

Racial Politics, Hot and Cool

In saying a policeman acted "stupidly" in arresting Henry Louis Gates Jr., President Obama has uncharacteristically inflamed a minor incident and revived last year's idiotic debate about whether or not he is "black enough" to suit African-Americans or, on the other hand, too black for those who see the world primarily in racial terms.

Until Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. became a campaign issue, Obama seemed intent on minimizing race and inviting voters to judge him as a "post-racial" candidate, but his cool approach was temporarily derailed by his pastor's inflammatory rhetoric and now again by his friend's histrionic temperament.

On Bill Maher's show and in other TV venues, Gates presents himself as a brilliant scholar who, like Wright and unlike Obama, tends to dramatize racial discussions--and himself-- in ways that can make even those who agree with him uncomfortable.

The escalation of his encounter with a Cambridge policeman has all the earmarks of an incident that could easily been avoided. If race were not involved, Gates' neighbor might have been less zealous in calling police at the sight of two men forcing open a door in broad daylight, and the responding officer more circumspect in confronting unarmed suspects, but Gates' affront at being questioned and his confrontational attitude seem likely to have been part of the "stupidity" the President was quick to condemn without knowing all the facts.

Now that all charges have been dropped and Gates and the policeman, who ironically teaches others about the complexities of racial profiling, have vented in the media, Barack Obama may want to revert to his cool and conciliatory approach to racial tensions--and think twice about elevating a minor incident to a national issue, leaving that work to Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and those who work full-time at it.