PRESIDENT Obama staged an awkward beer conference with a policeman and an angry professor last night, amid growing concerns he might not be very good at this.
The live drinking session with Professor Henry Gates, Sgt Jim Crowely and vice-president Joe Biden was watched by all those Americans who have not yet been forced to sell their televisions to pay for healthcare.
Following Sgt Crowley's controversial arrest of the black professor, the president and his senior advisers have been locked in meetings deciding what beer to serve and whether to serve it in glasses or bottles.
But across the country, Americans with actual lives said they were experiencing the early symptoms of having made a terrible mistake.
Todd Logan, from Milwaukee, said: "I'm really glad he went for glasses. I'm a glass man myself.
"That said, I was hoping he would spend a bit more time focusing on the fact that I don't have a job and that there are still lots of insane muslims who want to kill me."
But Lyle McAllister, from Tennessee, said: "I think the president was right. That police officer was stoopid. Ah wouldn't have arrested that niggra. Ah'd a killed the uppity sum-bitch."
After the meeting the president said it was important for the commander-in-chief to become intimately involved in any incident where two people got a bit upset.
He added: "Today I learned that an Hispanic woman in Boise, Idaho was given the wrong change at Wal-Mart. The cashier is obviously a moron and our supermarkets are still living in the 1950s.
"I would like to invite the short-changed woman, the cashier and Tom Hanks to join me at the White House for a beverage to be determined by a presidential commission headed by Neil Armstrong."
A White House spokesman said: "Let's not forget the president has kick-started a debate about race. Admittedly it's a stupid debate with lots of shouting and thinly-veiled death threats, but this is America."