Profiling Obama

GATES CLOSED

(The Washington Prowler) - It wasn't out of a need for racial healing that President Barack Obama reached out to his old friend, Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley.

"We were looking at House hearings on the matter moving fairly quickly, and that wasn't going to be good for us or for Gates," says a White House source. "We needed this thing to go away and go away fast."

Early Friday, the White House got wind of Rep. Edolphus Towns' interest in holding hearings into the matter of Gates' arrest, and more broadly looking into the issue of racial profiling by law enforcement. Towns is chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, as well as the senior House Democratic Member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Adding to the desire to get the story buried was the media's seeming refusal to let the story drop. By noon Friday, House press secretary Robert Gibbs, along with other senior White House officials, recommended that Obama either walk back his statement further than he did on Thursday, or take proactive action.

"The President chose action, in part because we saw this story eclipsing other issues and narratives that we needed front and center for August," says the White House source. "We didn't need House hearings keeping the story alive into August and then into the fall, when the hearings most likely would have been held. We have more important issues to deal with than this."