Strategic Backpedaling ...

Friday, President Obama tried to backpedalled his way out of his ill-advised comment that the Cambridge, Mass., police acted "stupidly" in arresting his friend, Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.

President Obama made the same mistake so many people commenting on this case have made. He criticized the behavior of police officers without knowing the facts, then he compounded the error by seeming to suggest that the arrest was part of a larger narrative of racial profiling by white police officers in the United States.

Commentators galore have condemned Crowley as a racist. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote,"Folks, no matter how much you'd like to think that racism is dead, the Gates affair demonstrates that we don't make this stuff up," he wrote.

Obama projected his own preconceptions onto this case, and In doing so, he maligned a man, who by all accounts is a stellar police officer, and he encouraged others to leap to the same erroneous conclusion.