“It started out as a casual suggestion,” said Peter Nicholas in the Los Angeles Times, but now President Obama’s “beer summit” with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley is a real “diplomatic mission.” And it’s getting way more attention than Obama’s forays into actual “high-level diplomacy” with foreign leaders—not that defusing the “volatile dispute” over Gates’ arrest and the issue of racial profiling will be any simpler.
The effectiveness of Obama’s “peacemaking efforts” are still to be determined, but at least “the drink orders are in,” said David Alexander in Reuters. The president will probably drink a Bud, Crowley a Blue Moon white ale, and Gates either Red Stripe or Beck’s.
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