What’s going on here?

The breakdown of the 24 hours following the presidential press conference requires a closer look.

First of all, President Obama controls the press unlike presidents before him. Whereas they looked over the raised hands in the press pool and called on someone to ask a question, Obama comes with a prepared list of names in the pool and reads from that. Very odd. Very controlled. The press act like schoolchildren remediated in classroom behavior.

Second, after taking questions from the chosen few who teed up cues from which Obama could launch his talking points on healthcare reform, he saved the last minute for one more, from Chicago’s hometown veteran Lynn Sweet. It was a presser about healthcare, it was about 56 minutes long. And oddly, Sweet’s final question was about a police incident in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that most Americans were probably unaware of in the first place. How this fit into a presidential presser on healthcare reform is…suspect.

The “post-racial” president launched on racial tension in America. And he injected himself in an incident with very large ramifications. Was this set up? If so, bad strategy. If not, still badly handled.

One overt thing it accomplished was to re-direct attention away from the healthcare debacle and onto racial tension. Which saturated the news shows from morning to night.

But a supposedly unintended consequence was to inject a new and inexperienced president into matters of law enforcement with personal judgment against….law enforcement.

President Obama told the NAACP last week that he believes there is less racial discrimination in America today than ever in our history. So it was passing strange this week to hear Mr. Obama draw a negative national racial lesson from a recent police incident involving black Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.

The subsequent two paragraphs lay out more details of the incident than we heard in that snap judgment in the White House.

Mr. Obama said Mr. Gates is a personal friend, and then scored the local police for “acting stupidly for arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.” The President also went on to see in the incident echoes of “a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.”

Mr. Obama has a point about history, but we’re not sure that an episode in an upscale neighborhood involving one of America’s most privileged individuals illustrates anything except a misunderstanding. Mr. Gates lives in a city with a black mayor, a state with a black governor and a country with a black President. The dispute was arguably about town-gown relations rather than race. If this is a teaching moment, one lesson is that it’s usually better to cooperate during encounters with law enforcement so that matters don’t escalate needlessly. And if a cop asks you to step out on the porch, or away from your car, it’s probably because he’s concerned for his own safety.

Mr. Obama’s broadside against local cops sends the wrong message to Americans of every race about how to respond to misunderstandings with police. His comments may also do more to aggravate than alleviate tensions between police officers and the minority communities they serve.

That became evident in the next 24 hours. The Cambridge police chief defended his force on this incident and took it as an opportunity to re-examine their policies and procedures.

The incident sparked a firestorm of controversy and a national debate over racism and racial profiling. Gates demanded an apology from Crowley on Wednesday and Crowley refused. President Barack Obama inserted himself into the controversy Wednesday night by saying police had “acted stupidly” in the incident.

Asked about Obama’s comment, Cambridge police commissioner Haas said that “this department is deeply pained.”

That went further.

President Barack Obama plunged his presidency into a charged racial debate and set off a firestorm with police officers nationwide by siding with a prominent black scholar who accuses police of racism.

Saying he was unaware of “all the facts” but that police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “acted stupidly” in their arrest of Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates, Obama whipped up emotions on both sides of an issue that threatens to open old wounds.

“The President has alienated public safety officers across the country by his comments,” said David Holway, president of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, which represents 15,000 public security officials.

In a letter to Obama, he sought an apology. “You not only used poor judgment in your choice of words, you indicted all members of the Cambridge police department and public safety officers across the country.”

It has grown into a national debate, overnight.

Pressed on the matter Thursday, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the president “was not calling the officers stupid,” but he declined repeatedly to say the president regretted his words.

To this point, he hasn’t.

But in all the media frenzy over this latest distraction from the derailed healthcare reform proposals, there’s this interesting analysis about that Cambridge incident, which dares to say what others haven’t.

I don’t know all the facts of the Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. case- indeed, one side says one thing and the other side says something different.

But, if you follow the rule that usually the truth is somewhere “in-between”, you could probably come to this conclusion: The good Professor might have acted in a way most of us know NOT to act and the police might have been a little touchy when they arrested him.

But, I also had another thought as I read the reports. Who yells at a police officer? In my experience only two types of people yell at police officers: drunken people and those who are “privileged”. By privileged I mean people who feel they are “above” the law. People who can afford expensive attorneys. People who are “connected”.

These people have attitudes and aren’t afraid to show them. Maybe it’s a part of my upbringing- but my first instinct when dealing with the police is cooperation.

Whose isn’t? The privileged.

But, in my experience, those with privilege don’t think like that. They say things like, “you don’t know who you’re dealing with” and “wait until I call my lawyer”. Another quote that I’ll add to that list now is: “this incident will help me make a movie about my field of study.”…

I don’t know and we’ll never know. But, it wouldn’t be the first time someone turned an innocuous incident into a headline in order to gain some notoriety. The one thing I do know is that 99.9% of the people I am familiar with don’t provoke the police…

I think our elites have always been a little out of touch, and maybe it is a perverted sign of progress that some African-American people today are able to do what their White counterparts have been doing for a long time: take advantage of their social status. The good doctor is, after all, a professor in one of the country’s most elite schools who counts the President as a friend.

Surely the “average” guy yelling at the “average” American police officer would have spent the night in jail. Maybe the real question is why a higher-class citizen was released with the charges dropped while a lower-class citizen would not have received the same treatment.

So we’re back to tensions between race and class, and meanwhile, healthcare reform efforts have been derailed. It has practically gone under radar that politicians demanding the most urgency on healthcare have suddenly flip-flopped.

Obama’s media grip is loosening.