When President Obama meets with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department for beers today, I wonder if our chief executive will use it as the “teachable moment” he referred to.

Maybe Crowley and Gates will learn to ratchet down their egos a bit, which, I suspect, is what got them into their predicament in the first place. And perhaps Obama has learned a lesson as well: that the nation’s chief executive should dummy up about local matters he admits he knows nothing about. Is there anything the rest of us can learn from this “teachable moment”?