"Yes, the president deserves some credit for the "beer summit' as successful damage control. But, overall, his personal intrusion into the Cambridge arrest was very damaging: he diverted attention from health care; he failed to teach the nation a lesson on the critical importance of getting the facts right before rendering judgments; and, by subsequently saying that both Professor Gates and Sergeant Crowley were good men but each had overreacted, he put the salient issue of racial profiling to the side and, to some extent, just rekindled the debate about the particular facts of a particular arrest."

"Indeed, the great irony of the President's failure to focus on the importance of facts and the processes for ascertaining them is that the problem of racial profiling stems, of course, from making law enforcement judgments based on stereotypes, not on facts which legitimately give rise to a proper stop or arrest."