Needlenose

At the end of his impromptu appearance in the White House briefing room earlier today, President Obama indirectly admitted why he was making yet another statement on the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.:

Over the last two days as we’ve discussed this issue, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but nobody has been paying much attention to health care.

The press laughed, but Obama was telling an important truth. Just as the ginned-up Whitewater and other investigations of President Clinton in 1994 were all about derailing healthcare reform, so is the Gates brouhaha for many of those who are delighted to stoke further arguments over it.

And that’s not just true in the literal sense of driving talk about healthcare reform off the cable news screens and newspaper front pages. The more Obama can be portrayed as someone tangled up in various controversies, the better it is for those who oppose healthcare reform.

The more Obama’s political opponents can stir up suspicion about him by depicting him as an angry black man rather than a president engaged in solving national problems, the better it is for those who oppose healthcare reform.

And as Republicans have known for decades, the angrier and more emotional the public discourse is in general, the easier it is to sabotage rational public policy legislation whose passage depends on the triumph of reason over fear.

That’s why Obama didn’t just address the Gates controversy again, he did so in a way designed to smother the emotional fires that have been stoked. Pulling out nearly every trick in the conflict-resolution handbook, he spoke in a measured (almost passive) tone, reached out personally to one of the involved parties, and used humor, combined with an explicit plea for everyone to calm down:

… to the extent that my choice of words didn’t illuminate, but rather contributed to more media frenzy, I think that was unfortunate.

What I’d like to do then I make sure that everybody steps back for a moment…

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…

Given Obama’s mention of a “teachable moment” and clear desire to defuse tensions, you’d almost think he read what bmaz wrote at Firedoglake this morning.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)