Compared to what has happened to Shirley Sherrod, an honest USDA official who was fired because of a hasty over-reaction by her employer to a deliberate misrepresentation of her remarks on the right-wing blog site of Andrew Breitbart, the mistreatment last year of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., by Cambridge police was certainly no more momentous or disturbing and no more what pundits now like to call a “teachable moment.” Yet, President Obama has not yet stepped  up to the microphone to highlight the lesson to be learned—not just by the country as a whole, but by Fox News, of course, by the NAACP, a bit surprisingly, and by the people, above all, who help run his administration (most notably, Agriculture Secretary, Tom Vilsack).

It was Ms. Sherrod who got it exactly right, in her remarks to the NAACP, when she described how she had come to realize that it is not about whether someone is black or white, but whether they are rich or poor. Unfortunately, it is increasingly clear that President Obama does not actually tend to side with the poor.  We have seen, time and again, how his ideas of reform inevitably stop far short of what is needed actually to curb the power and influence of the rich, how his language shrinks from the passionate empathy that victims of injustice require from a president committed to real, substantive social transformation. Say what you will, Henry Gates no longer lives on the cutting-edge of that kind of injustice.

So, what will the president do about Ms. Sherrod?  Will he personally speak out about her regrettable firing by his Department of Agriculture, as he once did about the Cambridge arrest of Henry Gates?  Will he invite her to the White House for a conciliatory drink? 

This is clearly a “teachable moment” for our president.