Enormous Racial Divide On Issue Of Obama's Handing Of Gates Question
Posted Jul 27, 2009 at 10:00 AM by Maurice Berger
The only poll thus far on the question of how President Obama handled the issue of the arrest of Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr indicates an enormous racial divide in the public's assessement. While an 46% of Americans rate the president’s response as poor, only 26% of voters nationwide say President Obama did a good or excellent job answering a press conference question about the incident involving a white Cambridge, Massachusetts policeman and a black Harvard professor. Yet, beneath the "top line numbers is a huge gap between the way that white and black Americans view the situation . . . 71% of African-Americans say the president’s response was good or excellent, a view shared by just 22% of white Americans. At the other extreme, 53% of white voters gave the president’s response a poor grade. 5% of black Americans offered such a negative response."
