President Obama holds Beer Summit at White House
Ever hear the one about the Beer Summit?
Four guys are sitting around a picnic table. One is drinking a Bud Light, another a Blue Moon, the third a Sam Adams Light and the last one, a non-alcoholic Bucklers. They munch on peanuts and pretzels. They discuss race relations. And photographers snap photographs like crazy.
The whole Beer Summit that happened Thursday at the White House in Washington DC totally sounds like the set up to a joke, doesn’t it? That’s because it sounds almost normal, four guys just enjoying a beer, but the punchline is that two of the men are two of the most powerful in the world: President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.
Beer Summit 2009 went down because of a racially fueled misunderstanding last week in Massachusetts when Sergeant James Crowley arrested Professor Henry Louis Gates outside of Gates’ home in what appeared to be a break in. Gates screamed “racial profiling,” President Obama backed him up, then Crowley stated the facts and everyone took a step back.
The Beer Summit was a way for all the parties to sit down and discuss what really happened and what could be done about it.
The President called it a “friendly, thoughtful” conversation. “I am confident that has happened here tonight, and I am hopeful that all of us are able to draw this positive lesson from this episode,” he added after the fact.
Crowley said that “I think what you had today was two gentlemen who agreed to disagree on a particular issue,” and that President Obama’s main function was that he “provided the beer.”
As for Gates, he said they all must use this situation “to foster greater sympathy among the American public for the daily perils of policing on the one hand, and for the genuine fears of racial profiling on the other hand.”
No word on the next kegger that’s going down at the White House, but I’ll bring the tap.
