Pundits and bloggers live for the kind of flare-up sparked by last week's Tea Party vs. NAACP vs. Andrew Breitbart vs. Obama vs. Fox News flap that saw a video clip lead to USDA employee Shirley Sherrod being labeled a racist, forced to resign, vindicated by the full video, apologized to by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and on the phone with President Barack Obama talking promotion -- all in one week.

Everyone else living, working and partying together in these recessionary times is mostly too busy to worry about the latest chapter in the less-than-edifying ''national conversation on race.'' If you hosted your own race-healing neighborhood beer summit over the weekend, you probably had to run back out for a bigger keg.

Almost exactly one year after Obama and Vice President Joe Biden hosted The Root's editor-in-chief, Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Cambridge police Sgt. James Crowley at the White House for a cold brew, Obama, Vilsack and Breitbart especially should be buying a round for Sherrod and the rest of America.

But if you're unhappy that we're not in the "post-racial" era hailed in 2008, then rewatch Obama's historic ''A More Perfect Union'' speech as a reminder that Obama wasn't the one who coined the term. And take heart, because five of the players in this episode actually acquitted themselves fairly well:

Shirley Sherrod

Sherrod's now famous NAACP speech was a testimony about confronting her own bias and moving beyond it. It's honest. It's what you're supposed to do. ''Even if you only hear the edited clip, to conclude that she's working up to an indictment of white people, you almost have to want it to be that way.'' As Princeton professor Cornel West described her on Face the Nation Sunday, Sherrod is small-d ''democratic nobility,'' ''black royalty,'' ''a Christian soldier'' and ''an American hero'' who promoted ''justice, not revenge.''

She doesn't need a new job at the USDA. They need to hire her at the White House so that she can tell David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett what people outside the Beltway are actually thinking. She knows something about the Eloise Spooner demographic that Axelrod and Jarrett clearly don't. Last year I wrote that Obama needed a wise older uncle on his team. Not as a "director of black outreach," like The New York Times' Maureen Dowd said Sunday, but as director of American outreach -- someone staff can run ideas by before springing them on the American people.

Eloise Spooner

You have a misunderstanding with your boss and it costs you your job. Out of nowhere, a customer from your old gig shows up and tells your boss in no uncertain terms that you're a great employee and he's a jackass for cutting you loose. That's what happened when Eloise Spooner -- wife of the white farmer Sherrod was supposed to have discriminated against -- jumped in and told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Sherrod was a ''friend for life'' who ''kept us out of bankruptcy.''