The Beer Summit Beers Belie Obama’s Conservatism
Just as only Nixon could go to China, perhaps only a conservative could be America’s first black president. At the time, the man who ran on hope and change was seen as a forward thinking and extremely liberal man, even if his greatest policy a
chievement, the Affordable Care Act, was modeled after a social policy that came from Mitt Romney, a Republican.
That this market-driven solution to America’s inefficient and chaotic healthcare system went from a moderate right-of-center solution to a harbinger of socialist death camps in a few years is a testament to the power of right-wing rhetoric and Americans’ superficial connection to issues. Most famously, Americans in polls overwhelmingly want universal healthcare yet many are swayed by propaganda against it. A shocking third of Americans didn’t even know Obamacare and the ACA are the same thing.
But I don’t want to relitigate the ignorance of the average American voter and the corrosiveness of polarized team sport politics; we all know all of that. Instead I want to go back to go to a single odd event in Obama’s presidency that underscores just how unidealistic Obama was — and how he was ever concerned with appealing to middle America, conserving the culture and protecting America from radical, transformative change.
If you don’t remember it, the Beer Summit was Obama’s response to a truly horrific and tragically familiar event: a black man was arrested for trying to enter his own home. It just so happened that man was Henry Louis Gates, an esteemed Harvard professor and possibly the greatest figure in African American literature studies alive.
That a man of such high social status could be harassed by police for the color of his skin was no surprise to America even then. The Black Lives Matter movement is just one in a series of efforts to cause the racism endemic to America’s law enforcement to stop, but black people have known for decades that they are unfairly policed. It hasn’t been a surprise to most non-blacks in America either, regardless of political orientation; the events are too frequent in history, the redlining and the failures of courts to protect their human rights are well known. One of America’s greatest novels, To Kill a Mockingbird, is all about the well-known fact that black men rarely see justice in America.
President Obama’s response to this was to say the police of Cambridge Mass. “acted stupidly,” and while that may be true, it is only a half truth. Racism is stupid, yes, but it is also racism and racist policing is a fact of American history.
Instead of acknowledging this fact, Obama played to the base. “I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played,” he famously said at a news conference, a statement that we could dismiss as obtuse if Obama was not himself a genius and a brilliant man, eloquent and able to communicate clearly and precisely. Occham’s razor urges us to conclude that Obama spoke not because he genuinely did not know what role race played, but because he wanted to placate that small minority of Americans who do not believe that racism is rampant in America’s police forces, all evidence to the contrary.
This is not the only time Obama guardedly appealed to a conservative minority viewpoint. When asked what his view of gay marriage was, he said it was “evolving,” something that rightly earned derision from both libertarian and liberal camps who saw a president defending an old and oppressive world order, no matter what color his skin might be.
Dedicated to placating all sides of a debate, no matter how repugnant, Obama invited the police officer who arrested a man for trying to enter his own home to a trip to the White House, along with Professor Gates, where the three would try to iron out their differences over a beer. Thus the Beer Summit was born.
And nothing demonstrates just how conservative Obama truly was than the beer he drank at that event. If indulging in a “both sides are valid” fallacy weren’t evidence enough of Obama’s moral failures, the proof of just how careful he was to pander at all times was on the table itself. He drank a Bud Light.
Gates, for his part, drank the Jamaican Red Stripe, a clear and brilliant nod to the black-majority nation state that, alongside its Caribbean neighbors, has witnessed some of the cruelest moments in the history of the transatlantic slave trade. The officer, whose name should be forgotten to history, had a Blue Moon, probably because that’s what he liked (or, more likely, he wasn’t a beer drinker; the lightly hopped Belgian wheat ale tastes more of orange and coriander than beer).
But Obama drank the beer of the midwest, the beer of the working man, and the beer of the Republican conservative. As one of the most popular beers of Republicans, Bud Light was a choice that Obama very clearly knew would appeal to the other side of the aisle — indicating, along with almost everything that president did, his desperate desire to compromise whatever beliefs he may truly have.
This is particularly infuriating, because we know Obama does not like Bud Light. An avid beer drinker, Obama became the first sitting president to brew beer inside the White House, making a honey ale from the White House’s homegrown beehives. He was seen early on in his political career enjoying pints of Guinenss in Ireland, and the pictures are of a man very clearly loving his pint. And like many homebrewers, he clearly was not a fan of mass produced American light lagers. At the start of his presidential run, he clearly did not know Yuengling, and when he supposedly asked “off the cuff” whether it was expensive (“Wanna make sure it’s not some designer beer or something”), it was as clear as when he dropped the g’s at the end of his gerunds that he was pandering to a working-class audience.
A man who brews honey ale at home does not worry that he’s about to have a “designer beer”. He makes designer beers!
Okay, so Obama pandered to a working class white audience. Maybe he felt a need to — having the middle name “Hussein” and being the first black presidential candidate was surely terrifying and intimidating to a large number of white conservatives at the time. Perhaps he was shrewd and cynical in his politicking, but maybe it was for the greater good?
A charitable interpretation of all of this is that Obama overcorrected. A man who genuinely wanted to end wars abroad pivoted to drone strikes. A man who wanted the poor to get healthcare used a Republican-built insurance exchange. And a man who didn’t want to scare off racists had a Bud Light.
We can never know the thoughts of another person, so we can never know if Obama’s error was caution rather than a true desire to conserve the status quo. I would tend to give him the benefit of the doubt and say, in fact, Obama felt the need to tread very carefully as America’s first black president.
But at the end of the day, does it really matter? The end result was a president who promised hope and change only to spend eight years dashing hopes and changing little.
