in that statement certainly in the middle years of the obama journey. there was a time when after that beer summit, you remember skip gates was arrested in his home, an african-american famous professor arrested in his own home for being in his own moment and the president said that was fool esh. he got a big backlash from that and after the president was too silent for many years on the issue of race. he did talk about it in terms that made it seems like in black kids just pulled their pants up, jobs would fall down from the sky. but he has changed quite a bit since trayvon martin. the whole country has moved on this and so has the president. i don t think it s bad to have a discussion about race and the president s relationship and how it has changed over time. i think it s terrible for rupert murdoch to jump in and be the
arbiter on who is black and who is not when he has been such a destructive force. i think eleisa garza they ar right to raise the question, what about us. it goes on to talk about that moment with skip gates. he said that police act foolishly. he says his advisers wished they had not had that meeting. they wish he would have come out and say what i meant to say was they behaved damn foolishly. i a i want to talk about the polls. donald trump, this is for you. this is carson on the debt ceiling appearing. he spoke at the marketplace about the economy and the debt limit and it s a very interesting conversation. i want you to listen and then we ll talk about it.
some of the thought in the white house, and the president did say that, he didn t want to set the precedent, and there would be a precedent if he did it. the thought in the white house, there are so many medals given to so many different people who deserve it for what they have done, but then you have people who could have done other things as well. so you start a chain reaction of pulling everyone else s medals. so that s some of the thought in the white house that i was getting prior to the president s answer today. let me go to jonathan. i liked the answer because it was a sharp statement of rights and crime. rape is a crime. it used to be settled by execution in the old days before the supreme court said it was cruel and unusual. but in terms of its severity, i thought he nailed it. yes, and the other thing about the president s response, i felt like we had gone full circle. remember the white house press conference where he was asked about the arrest of harvard professor ski
remember the white house press conference where he was asked about the arrest of harvard professor skip gates at his own home and he spoke openly about how he thought the cambridge police quote, acted stupidly in arresting the professor in his own home. the fire storm that erupted after that as a result, many people point to as the reason for the president being very reticent to talk about anything related to race either directly or indirectly. today, we saw the president snap back to that barack obama, someone who was forceful someone who was speaking his mind. but this time aware that because there s litigation involved, that he had to make it clear that he wasn t going to get into the details, but generally speaking if you do x, then y is the case and the way he did it today, i thought, was incredibly forceful. and i want to piggy back on what jonathan said. some of my sources in the white
it was a very, very big concern. he early in his career he talked about race. his book was about race. he was forced to talk about race with jeremiah wright. he did well. once he got into the white house he said something about skip gates being arrested. he got hit so hard that he found himself in a beer summit with a beat cop just trying to escape from the backlash. he was basically silent and a racialpinata for years. blacks beating him up. whites saying he was going to play the race card and he didn t feel comfortable dealing with this issue. this past year, starting with trayvon martin, with the fergusons, baltimore. to have a friend of his, a young black leader gunned down. you see obama 3.0. i think what you re going to see