Yesterday’s “Beer Summit” adds a whole new dimension to the term personal diplomacy. Actually, I thought Barack Obama, as usual, played it just right, telling the press “This is not a summit, guys. This is three folks having a drink at the end of the day and hopefully giving people an opportunity to listen to each other.” I’ll sip a beer anytime that it promotes and encourages social civility, dialogue, and cooler heads prevailing.
The more I learn about that unfortunate front-porch incident and the background of Gates and Crowley, the more I’m convinced that they’re both decent, well-meaning men. My guess is each copped an attitude with the other, tempers flared, and neither one was willing to back down and walk away when their encounter reached the flash-over point. (Neither Cambridge cops nor Harvard professors are known to the world at large for their humility.)
And in that case, it’s never, ever the police officer involved that ends up sitting in the backseat of the patrol car. (Geeze, I think I was about seven-years old when I leaned that you don’t say anything to tick off a cop, on duty or off. Isn’t that common sense?)
My one complaint about the Beer Summit, er, I mean, White House Happy Hour?
What’s Obama doing drinking Bud Light?
Mr. President, please, that is such a wimpy excuse for beer! It’s training beer! It’s water pretending to be beer when it grows up! It’s the brewer’s equivalent of a typical politician’s stump speech: focus-group tested, commoditized, homogenized, manufactured, and lacking any art, depth, bite or satisfying, lingering aftertaste. So unlike you!
I would have imagined that a man of your manifest sophistication and erudition—the best public speaker to have inhabited the White House in decades—would have rewarded your gold-plated throat and vocal cords with something better: maybe a hoppy, thirst-quenching IPA (I’m become very partial to that produced under the Long Hammer brand), or considering the summertime heat of the capital, a refreshing, cool hefenweizen. (Check out Harpoon’s UFO brew: Wunderbar!)
Then again, considering the barrage of polical flak directed at Obama a few months back from various right-wing cable talkers and other untethered nut-jobs for simply ordering a burger with dijon mustard, perhaps the astute maneuver was to stay away from elitist micro-breweries or foreign brands and stick with something middle-of-the-road and tasteless, but politically palatable.
I can almost hear Rush Limbaugh: “In yet another sign betraying his true ultra-left leanings, Barack Obama drank a bottle of Stella—a beer produced in Belgium under a European-style, socialist regime that does not believe in giving their citizens the chance to choose their own personal physician—at yesterday’s Beer Summit. Meanwhile, hundreds of patriotic American brewery workers are in danger of losing their jobs to foreign competition…..
I think I need a beer.
Brave New Whirl 