CNN Poll: 54% of Americans Think Barack Obama Acted Stupidly in Gates/Crowley Cambridge, MA Arrest

Drip, drip, drip … Obama’s support is eroding on all fronts.

“One-third of whites say that Obama’s comments about this matter made them feel less favorable toward him.”

Obama’s Teachable moment, he lost the white vote.

The Beer Summit did not help Obama’s poll numbers.

The poll numbers just do not get any better no matter what the issue is these days with regards to Barack Obama’s actions as President. In a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey, 54% of those polled do not feel that Cambridge, Massachusetts police office James Crowley acted stupidly when he arrested Gates at the professor’s home. According to the poll analysis, a new national poll indicates that white and black Americans don’t see eye to eye. Really? A matter only made worse by President Barack Obama’s comments of Cambridge police acting “stupidly” without having and caring to have any facts.

Fifty-four percent of those questioned say they think the president acted stupidly when the commented on the Gates arrest, with 32 percent disagreeing. But again, the poll indicates a racial divide, with more than six out of 10 whites feeling Obama acted stupidly but just one in four black respondents agreeing.

For the larger question that Barack Obama cares about and that being how did his “race card” foot in mouth hurt him politically? The answer is as follows:

Did Obama’s initial comments damage his political standing?

“One-third of whites say that Obama’s comments about this matter made them feel less favorable toward him, compared to only four percent of whites who feel more favorably toward Obama due to his comments,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “But the majority of whites say that Obama’s comments did not affect their views of him, and most whites approve of how Obama is handling race relations.”

The Most Important Number(s) in Politics Today

63, 25: The first number is the percentage of whites who believe that President Barack Obama “acted stupidly” in his comments about the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. while the second is the number of African Americans who believe the same thing, according to a new CNN/Opinion Research poll.

The sharp divide evidenced in these numbers shows why President Obama and his political team wanted to move away from the issue as quickly as possible. From a political perspective, Gates-gate amounts to a no-win situation since there is no obvious consensus from voters about what the event meant and why.