It's a great result for beer - and hopefully for diplomacy - when to recover from a potentially volatile situation the President invites you to his house to sort out some problems.
The thing is about this story is he didn’t just summon them to the White House for a meeting, he invited them to his house for a beer. Why this offer is so significant seems obvious, but think about it...there’s more to it than getting personally involved. It’s what the offer signified. I'm not sure why his offer carries so much unspoken emphasis, maybe its one of those men are from mars things, but things are just more relaxed over a beer.
One of the best things you can say about a person is, “I could sit down and have a beer with them”. I think what you're really saying is that "he's such a good bloke that I can just relax and enjoy their company – rather than feel more formal and business-like and guarded."
Having a beer in this way is a gesture that's evolved a bit like shaking hands. The gesture of shaking hands because if two men met and offered empty right hands, it showed they weren't armed and so a basic level of trust was displayed that one wasn't going to knife the other. Maybe having a beer evolved similarly. Beer doesn't have to have the same ritual and the language as wine, or the need to have the right glass or the need to extract all of the pleasure of drinking it by over analysing the drink's every nuance. It's a beer and you can just drink it and talk and none of it is too formal or serious.
As Pete Brown put it more succinctly, "in every single culture where beer is drunk, to invite someone to share a beer with you is not just politeness; it symbolises an offer of friendship."
An offer of a beer says this will a relaxed meeting of people on an even footing and you can let your guard down...and hopefully solve a problem.
I was inteviewed about this story yesterday by Craig Zonca on ABC Radio in Capricornia. Here's what we talked about. [audio http://beermatt.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/abc_regional_obama_beer.mp3]