Trace it back to July 22, 2009.
On July 22, President Barack Obama said about the incident, “I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home, and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Louis_Gates_arrest_controversy
Was this the Gates of hell?
I think we could have done without this gratuitous pan. Obama wasn’t trying to be diplomatic. He could have said he believed there could be “wiser” ways to address situations like Gates. But that would require upside thinking, something that Obama apparently seems incapable of. We think Carter gave us malaise, well Obama got America upchucking.