BARACK Obama is struggling to contain a controversy over his involvement in racial politics that has diverted public attention from his focus on winning support for reform of the US health system.
Henry Louis Gates, the black Harvard professor at the centre of the furore, yesterday adopted a more conciliatory tone, following a phone call from the US President, and confirmed he would put aside anger over being arrested by white police at his home last week.
He even accepted Mr Obama's invitation to the White House for a beer with him and the arresting police officer, Sergeant James Crowley.
But if Mr Obama had hoped the issue would blow over, he would be disappointed. The US political landscape has continued to be dominated by the race relations debate the President kicked off during a prime-time press conference last Wednesday, when he accused police of acting stupidly over the Gates arrest and condemned racial profiling used to discriminate against coloured people.
With Mr Obama directing intense energy over the previous fortnight to lobby congress to extend health cover to 47 million uninsured Americans, he now acknowledges his frustration with the timing of the race debate.
"I don't know if you've noticed, but nobody has been paying much attention to healthcare," he said.
Mr Obama made a rare appearance at the White House daily press briefing on Friday in an attempt to soften his earlier remarks and get the focus of debate back where he wanted it.
Advised by his wife, Michelle, and close friends to front the media and hose down the furore, he confirmed he had contacted Sergeant Crowley, who he believed was an outstanding police officer and a good man.
Referring to the controversy, Mr Obama said: "I obviously helped to ratchet it up. I want to make clear that in my choice of words, I think I unfortunately gave the impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department or Sergeant Crowley specifically, and I could have calibrated those words differently."
Nonetheless, Mr Obama stuck with his belief that police had overreacted by pulling Professor Gates out of his home and charging him with disorderly conduct, a charge later dropped. He also believed Professor Gates had probably overreacted as well.
The Harvard professor, acknowledged by Mr Obama as a friend, got into trouble last week with police when he tried to break into his house, in the company of his driver, after mislaying his keys. Sergeant Crowley arrived after a witness had telephoned police to alert them to a possible burglary. An altercation, followed by arrest, appears to have erupted when the police sergeant demanded to see Professor Gates's identification.
Deeply offended by Mr Obama's remarks, the Cambridge police union has demanded he apologise for demeaning Sergeant Crowley. The sergeant has claimed it was Professor Gates who turned the encounter into a racial incident by alleging he was being targeted as an African-American.
Despite admitting he lacked all the facts, the President injected himself directly into the argument when asked one question about it at the tail-end of Wednesday's press conference, which had been devoted entirely to explaining why health reform was urgent.
During last year's presidential election, he went out of his way to avoid race and played down his African-American heritage, but there have been strong expectations among black leaders that he would address the issue at some point, and he spoke out a week before the Gates incident at a centenary celebration of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People in New York.
NAACP leaders believe Mr Obama cannot dance around the race issue and must discuss the Gates incident directly.
The President calls it a teaching moment: "The fact that this has become such a big issue I think is indicative of the fact that race is still a troubling aspect of our society."
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