Beer O’Clock at the White House: Let’s Move On

The black scholar and the white police sergeant who arrested him agreed to disagree and promised to talk again, a gracious conclusion to the first round of an eye-opening dialogue on race that allows President Barack Obama to get back to selling his health care plan to skeptical Americans.

After accepting Obama’s invitation to discuss the July 16 incident over a beer Thursday evening at the White House, both Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. Joseph Crowley thanked Obama for the cold ones served on a patio near the Rose Garden. Neither they nor the president offered apologies for their roles in the affair.

Obama became embroiled in the debate over whether Crowley was justified in arresting Gates at his Cambridge home when the president told a news conference last week that police had “acted stupidly.” He quickly backtracked in the face of police complaints, acknowledged he should have used different language to express his concerns, and invited the two men to join him for a beer.