Cute, and gratifying that they got along well enough that he can be light-hearted about what happened, but this reminds me of what his daughter said about Crowley’s daughter’s “heavy and charmingly untrained amount of green eyeliner.” Class consciousness keeps creeping into the Gateses’ rhetoric in the aftermath, which makes me wonder if the deeper affront of the arrest was to their identity as American aristocracy. Race plays into that — doubtless Gates would say that a white aristocrat would never have been treated similarly — but plenty of white aristocrats would also have taken offense at being treated in such an undignified way by blue-collar joes unaware of their station. Which is just another reminder of how atypical this is an “example” of profiling: Gates, with his connections at Harvard and the White House, was far more powerful than the cops accused of hassling him. In which case, if you’re Crowley, why arrest him and risk the headache of a public outcry once you knew who he was unless you thought you had good reason to?

As for why Biden was at the beer summit: Optics, silly.