For the supposed greatest public speaker of his generation, our president sure has to apologize for his word choice pretty frequently. But what does this mean?
“Because this has been ratcheting up and I obviously helped to contribute ratcheting it up, I wanted to make clear in my choice of words I think I unfortunately gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department or Sgt. Crowley specifically. And I could have calibrated those words differently.”
He doesn’t actually apologize for what he said, or even imply that he actually did anything wrong. It is indeed unfortunate that he maligned the police with his words (”gave an impression” – he said they acted “stupidly” and then went on a rant about racism). And he indeed could have chosen his words differently. But he stands by the position that it’s his job to run off at the mouth about these sorts of matters. And he continues with his old shtick that this isn’t about him or about any particular incident, it’s about America’s race problem.
My hope is is that as a consequence of this event, this ends up being what’s called a teachable moment, where all of us, instead of pumping up the volume, spend a little more time listening to each other and try to focus on how we can generally improve relations between police officers and minority communities, and that instead of flinging accusations, we can all be a little more reflective in terms of what we can do to contribute to more unity.
So we should learn from what he did. He shouldn’t have done anything differently. He could have done something differently, but he wasn’t wrong to do what he did. We’re all just wrong to have made a big deal about it.
Apollo posted this at 2:42 PM EDT on Friday, July 24th, 2009 as Fake Apologies, Race