national stage in 2004. no other country on earth is my story even possible. reporter: in 2008 then senator obama s prospect of becoming the first african-american president was almost derailed when his pastor was caught making racist remarks. forcing obama to address race head-on. reverend wright s comments were not only wrong but divisive. divisive at a time when we need unity. reporter: michelle obama, too, felt under siege. what do you think is the one thing most people get wrong? about you? people don t think i love my country. i don t think there could be anything further from the truth. reporter: during obama s first term in the white house, he was rett stoent address racial straight to head-on. his so-called beer summit aimed at mending fences between a white police officer and a black college professor was widely panned. the backlash shocked him. and he winds up after the arrest of skip gates sitting down
and i think it s difficult, given the fact that he doesn t have as much political capital as he used to have. it is difficult, paul, because at times in the past president obama has stepped in it a little bit. i m thinking of 2010 when he waded into the controversy in cambridge, massachusetts when henry louis gates was arrested by the cambridge police and president obama called that stupid. and then ended in a beer summit he sort of had to apologize to the police. he can t be seen as always siding against the police. that s a good point. especially on that case, you re right. i think it hurt him in the polls, but he spoke out. and an eminent professor at harvard arrested in his own home. falsely presumed to be breaking into his own home. the president is a friend of skip gates, now that he s been president for a long time he understands he s the leader of the executive branch.
the problems are not just in the imaginations of black people, they are real and they re an american problem. the thing i always go back to with regards to obama and race is hesitancy to speak on racism and specifically racism from white americans is his 2009 comments about skip gates and skip gates arrest at his home in cambridge. those comments, you know, resulted in a demonstrable and observable decrease and support among white americans. and after that, what you saw was a recurring pattern of obama on the rare occasions he spoke about racism receiving similar hits in public opinion from whites. the president has been bitten so many times on this, he s hesitant to speak. that s not an excuse. i think that at this point in his presidency, all of this is kind of baked into the cake. so i m not sure he has much to
skip gates and a recent commencement speech delivered to morehouse graduates. take a listen. when you think about why, in the african-american community at least, there s a lot of pain around what happened here, i think it s important to recognize that the african-american community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn t go away. the fact that it has garnered so much attention i think is a testimony to the fact that these are issues that are still very sensitive here in america. my whole life i ve tried to be for michelle and my girls what my father was not for my mother and me. i want to break that cycle. where a father s not at home. where a father s not helping to
raise that son or daughter. joining me now, msnbc contributor and president ceo for voto latino and from the daily beast jamel bowie. i wanted to sort of intentionally make the point that the president really has sort of picked his spots, picked his moments when he s weighed into these issues in a public way. why now he would have this kind of conversation with the new yorker magazine? part of it is because he s no longer up for election. he sort of has a freedom to discuss these issues that wasn t true in his first term. that s what you saw with the zimmerman verdict, he was much more forthright and forthcoming than he d been before that. remember the first time he tried to talk about racial issues after the arrest of skip gates, his approval rating with white just took a sudden dip. it wasn t attributable to