At 'beer summit,' will guys pour hearts out?
Peter Nicholas - Tribune Washington BureauIssue date: 7/23/09 Section: Real News
WASHINGTON - It started out as a casual suggestion: three guys working out their differences over a beer.
But President Barack Obama's offer to play host for a meeting with the cop and the professor entangled in a debate over racial profiling now has the trappings of high-level summitry.
White House aides are fielding questions about the brand of beer the men will drink (the president supposedly favors Budweiser). The date and time of the meeting are, for now at least, a closely guarded secret.
Bilateral meetings between Obama and a host of foreign leaders in recent months have gotten less attention than the president's attempt to mediate a dispute between Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley and Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Diplomacy is tricky. Obama offended the Cambridge police when he said they acted "stupidly" in arresting Gates at his own home July 16. Gates and Crowley have left open the prospect of suing one another. And none of the three has explicitly apologized, though Obama came close last week when he said his choice of words was poor.
What does the president expect will come from the meeting, planned sometime this week? White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said in an interview that it might be the first baby step toward a rapprochement.
"A lot of this is going to happen between (Gates and Crowley) without the president going forward," Gibbs said. "You had a situation where for whatever reason both individuals couldn't step back. And at least this will provide an opportunity to show people that that's possible - and hopefully start a bigger dialogue."
The beer summit will be closely monitored. Many black leaders believe Obama was on target with his initial comments. They don't want the moment to pass without a fuller discussion of racial profiling.
"His first response was appropriate, which was that the police officer behavior was stupid, not that the officer was stupid," said Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP's Washington office.
But President Barack Obama's offer to play host for a meeting with the cop and the professor entangled in a debate over racial profiling now has the trappings of high-level summitry.
White House aides are fielding questions about the brand of beer the men will drink (the president supposedly favors Budweiser). The date and time of the meeting are, for now at least, a closely guarded secret.
Bilateral meetings between Obama and a host of foreign leaders in recent months have gotten less attention than the president's attempt to mediate a dispute between Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley and Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Diplomacy is tricky. Obama offended the Cambridge police when he said they acted "stupidly" in arresting Gates at his own home July 16. Gates and Crowley have left open the prospect of suing one another. And none of the three has explicitly apologized, though Obama came close last week when he said his choice of words was poor.
What does the president expect will come from the meeting, planned sometime this week? White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said in an interview that it might be the first baby step toward a rapprochement.
"A lot of this is going to happen between (Gates and Crowley) without the president going forward," Gibbs said. "You had a situation where for whatever reason both individuals couldn't step back. And at least this will provide an opportunity to show people that that's possible - and hopefully start a bigger dialogue."
The beer summit will be closely monitored. Many black leaders believe Obama was on target with his initial comments. They don't want the moment to pass without a fuller discussion of racial profiling.
"His first response was appropriate, which was that the police officer behavior was stupid, not that the officer was stupid," said Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP's Washington office.
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