After Rose Garden Beer Blast, America Returns To Blissful Denial

By Les Payne

It is impossible to imagine another U.S. President, not even “Honest Abe Lincoln,” inviting the cop to the White House who’d humiliated “a friend” by arresting him at home on a charge so freakish that the DA tossed it as an embarrassment.

Yet, here was Sgt James Crowley knocking back Blue Moons Thursday as a white folk hero on the Rose Garden patio. The professor cuffed under false pretenses sat under the same magnolia tree across from the leader of the world’s lone superpower.

Did President Obama teach his point?

The White House photo op was aimed, of course, at that majority white audience siding with Sgt Crowley. Poll numbers had dipped against the president’s statement that in arresting his friend at his home, the Cambridge cop had “acted stupidly.”

The beer blast didn’t change Gates’ sense of being wronged racially, or Crowley’s flat-footed denial. This unsettled charge has to be bounced to a higher court.

Supporters tend to break down along racial lines that in miniature reflect the cleft stick of race relations in America, especially as it applies to the criminal justice system.

African-Americans resent the White House showcasing of this local, “rogue cop” as a participant in a constructive dialogue on race. They tempered their critique, however, with respect for Obama as a brilliant, political tactician, with skills that—unlike, say, complaining black leaders—have earned him the presidency of the United States.

Even among defenders, the mere sight of the tight-faced, Irish cop at the Rose Garden round-table raised second thoughts. To give Sgt Crowley the benefit of the doubt under the circumstances of the Gates’ arrest is a scary thought indeed.

Still, the very staging of the Obama beer blast itself, rounded off with a pretzel-snacking Joe Biden, appears to have worked at least in one aspect:

The Cambridge soap opera has been defused as a distraction.