Tunku  Varadarajan

Tunku Varadarajan

8/03/2009 @ 12:00AM

Why Was Biden There?

Here are five thoughts–four whimsical, one relatively serious–on the beer summit at the White House, hosted by President Obama for Professor Gates of Harvard and Sergeant Crowley of the Cambridge Police, with Vice-President Biden in attendance.

1. Why didn’t one of the men have the guts to ask for a glass of wine? Was I the only one to find the (pseudo) blue-collar beer trope rather irritating?

2. How depressing that two of the four men drank beer that was “lite,” and one drank “beer” that was non-alcoholic. How depressing, in particular, that the President drank Bud Lite, indisputably the most disgusting beer in the world.

3. Why, oh why, do people put fruit in their beer? (Crowley dunked a slice of orange in his, Biden a slice of lemon.) It is an inane custom, and ruins both the beer (except in the case of Bud Lite) and the fruit.

4. Why didn’t the president and the vice-president keep their jackets on, as their guests did? The rolled-shirtsleeves stuff was a hackneyed bid for informality, especially with the ties still on.

5. Now to my serious question: Why was Biden there?

Could it be that President Obama was afraid of how the photos might look to Middle America if they had shown a white man outnumbered by black men–and elite black men at that? Given that the meeting was over in the blink of an eye, it was little better than theater. But theater is vital in politics, and Biden’s presence turned the play into something altogether more reassuring. The white man was not outnumbered by the black.

Why is this important? I venture that in Obama’s careful calibration of his post-racial America there is always a fear of white fear. He is exquisitely sensitive to white– particularly non-elite white–impressions of his occupancy of the White House. He is eager not to disconcert Middle America, and had blundered only days before in his intervention in the Gates-Crowley affair. This ruffled many whites: They were taken aback, disquieted and were reminded, perhaps, of Obama’s remarks about bitter and intolerant small-town voters who cling to their faith and guns, made before the Pennsylvania primary.

Obama didn’t so much misspeak–in saying that Sergeant Crowley had “acted stupidly” in arresting Prof. Gates–as miscalculate his speech. For a man who measures out his words in coffee spoons, his intervention in the affair was heavy-handed. Suddenly, everyone became acutely interested in the following question: How real is Obama when he speaks to the nation? What does he really think? How much of his true beliefs do we get when he talks to us, and how much of it is speech that has been measured, tailored and tallied beforehand for value and impact? America, suddenly, wants to know. As Shelby Steele wrote in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, “We should hold Mr. Obama to his post-racialism, and he should get to know himself well enough to tell us what he really means by it.”

Obama is a very skilled politician. He would not have become president if he’d made white people afraid. The best way to ensure that people are not afraid is to ensure that you’re not threatening–and President Obama had never been threatening until the Gates affair. By “threatening” I don’t of course mean to say that Obama intended to menace; as the Gates arrest demonstrated, what is “threatening” is a matter of perception–and Middle America’s perception of the president has now altered in a small but significant way.

I was not privy to the reasoning behind the decision to draw Biden into the meeting. But I do know that his presence altered the racial chemistry in a crucial way. And in doing so, it allowed President Obama to ensure that he didn’t compound those racial fears–incipient, unsettling–that he’d stoked days before when he “acted stupidly.”


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