GLENN LOURY: Obama, Gates and the American Black Man. “The Gates arrest is a made-for-cable-TV tempest in a teapot. It is the rough equivalent of a black man being thrown out of a restaurant after having berated an indifferent maître d’ for showing him to a table by the kitchen door, all the while declaring what everybody is supposed to know: this is what happens to a black man in America. . . . It is depressing in the extreme that the president, when it came time for him to expend political capital on the issue of race and the police, did so on behalf of his ‘friend’ rather than stressing policy reforms that might keep the poorly educated, infrequently employed, troubled but still human young black men in America out of prison.”