Media from every corner of the world was there. The New York Times even sent a “live blogger” to chronicle the nuanced meaning behind every gesture viewed from the media’s perch, which was out of earshot. President Obama’s “beer summit,” according to the assembled scribblers, was a tremendous success. Cambridge Police Sergeant James Crowley and nutty Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates met over cold beers at a picnic bench outside the Oval Office. Obama served as bartender.
According to nutty professor Gates, his family took a White House tour separate from that given the Crowley family. The families eventually met in the White House library. “Nobody knew what to do,” Gates told the Times, “so I walked over, stuck up my hand and said, ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you.’ That broke the awkwardness.”
Now imagine if nutty professor Gates had tried that approach when he first met officer Crowley outside his Cambridge home. Instead of approaching the officer with curiosity and respect, the paranoid assumption on Gates’ part was that Crowley was a racist out to get him. The fact that Crowley had no idea who the nutty professor was, only fueled Gates' paranoia and anger.
Of Obama’s idea to hold a cooling-off summit over cold beers, Gates said, “Only he [Obama] could have done that. I don’t think anybody but Barack Obama would have thought about bringing us together.”
And what did the nutty professor take away from the summit? “I learned about police officers and the stresses and realities of the excellent job the police do every day. At the same time, racial profiling is a very dangerous thing with a long history, and we have to make Americans more sensitive to the realities of racial profiling.” Apparently, officer Crowley’s mistake was seeing the nutty professor’s paranoid ravings as disorderly conduct and not viewing it as the racial profiling sensitivity training it was meant to be. The beer summit's bright spot, if it can be called that, is that Gates is more ugly sober than drunk.
Of course, the most interesting thing about the summit got very little coverage. Sitting at the picnic bench with the police officer and the race-baiting professor, hoisting a cold one, was our crazy speak-first and think-much-later (if at all) Vice President Joe Biden. The reason the press was kept a fair distance from the summit, I think, was the vice president’s tendency to say very stupid things to the press every time he opens his mouth. One can only imagine the words of wisdom he would impart once the alcohol coursed through his bloodstream and into his very small brain. At least officer Crowley was on hand to constrain Gates if Biden offended the nutty professor with any surreal, alcohol-laced bromides.
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