President sees opportunity for national dialogue
WASHINGTON -- African-American scholar Henry Louis Gates and the police officer who arrested him last week are likely to get together at the White House soon as President Obama tries to quell a furor his words helped fuel.
"The president sees this as an opportunity to get dialogue going on an issue … that has been historically troubling," adviser David Axelrod said Sunday on CBS' Face the Nation. Axelrod said he expects the meeting to take place but did say when.
The controversy over who was to blame for the confrontation between Gates and Sgt. James Crowley — and whether racism played a role — has overshadowed the White House's attempts to focus on proposals to overhaul health care and brought a harsh judgment from voters in a national survey.
In a Rasmussen poll of likely voters Friday and Saturday, 46% rated Obama's response to a question about the issue at a prime-time news conference Wednesday as poor; 26% called it good or excellent. Obama said then that the police department in Cambridge, Mass., had "acted stupidly" in arresting Gates after an exchange of words at the Harvard professor's home. A woman called police when she saw Gates trying to force open the front door, which had jammed.
On Friday, the president made a rare appearance in the White House briefing room to say he "could have calibrated those words differently." In phone calls to Crowley and Gates, he also discussed the possibility of getting together at the White House to talk.
"What he was concerned about was that his poor choice of words helped pushed the debate in the wrong direction, and he wanted to get it back on track," Axelrod said on CNN's State of the Union. "If you hear the dialogue since, it has been very constructive, and we've sort of relieved some of the heat, and now we're seeing more light in this discussion, and that's a positive thing."
The Rasmussen survey illustrated the nation's racial divide in assessing what happened. By more than 2-1, white voters gave Obama a negative rating for his comments; black voters overwhelmingly rated him positively.
About three in four black voters said they believed that most blacks receive unfair treatment from the police. Just one in five white voters agreed.
The poll of 1,000 likely voters had a margin of error of +/—3 percentage points for the full sample.
Obama, usually guarded when asked about racial issues, insisted that he didn't misstep by expressing his views.
"Race is still a troubling aspect of our society," he said Friday. "Whether I were black or white, I think that me commenting on this and hopefully contributing to constructive, as opposed to negative, understandings about the issue is part of my portfolio."