Tyler Cowen explains why President Obama made a strategic mistake by stepping into the middle of the Henry Louis Gates story:
[E]ngaging with the incident has been one of the few major tactical mistakes of the Obama Presidency. Presidents (and many others) make big mistakes when they “respond” to people with much lower status than themselves, in this case the policeman and his ilk. The net effect is to lower the status of the Presidency and this will prove especially important when Obama is trying to pass a controversial health care plan. Today he looks less “post-racial” than he did a week ago and although it was only one slip it won’t be easy to reverse that.
Look at this way; the main reason that Obama had a press conference Wednesday was to push his health care plan. We’ve spent the last two days talking mostly about his statement regarding a minor police incident in a college town in Massachusetts. That’s a big political mistake.
July 24th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
…or not.
Perhaps the intent actually was to draw our attention away from the bloated health care bill for a while…