The Man Who Came To Dinner

I have to admit that the thing I would hate most if I woke up and found myself stuck in the White House would be the sense of imprisonment. I’m a walker. I’ve walked all over Rome, New York, Beirut, Boston, Los Angeles, Athens, Grand Rapids, et cetera. That’s my exercise.
I walk. The last president who did that was Harry Truman—and he drove the secret service nuts. In this era, if a president wants to go for a walk—let alone out for pizza and a movie—it takes advance notice and planning like the D-Day Invasion. I would hate that dreadfully.
So I perfectly understand the impulse that sent the Obamas to New York for dinner in the Village and a show. I really do. But, in politics—and for a president every sneeze, sniffle and tickle becomes a political act—appearance is everything.
However limiting the need to keep up appearances may feel, it is a stark necessity for a man who is both the sovereign head of state and the national symbol to do. He or she has no choice in the matter. Before Watergate blew the lid off things, a president could serve four terms in a wheelchair (or have several mistresses) and his secret was safe.
Today’s presidents are allowed to have no secrets. There are no quiet diversions, licit or illicit. When Bill and Hillary Clinton had a few knockdown, drag out fights early in his administration, it got reported. We even know now that Richard Nixon wouldn’t take off his shoes to walk the beach.
Jimmy Carter is still held up to derision because he rowed hastily away from what may well have been a rabid rabbit—a real danger that a citified reporter probably wouldn’t have known anything about. So forth and so on.
We insist on knowing whether or not our Hollywood celebrities are wearing underwear; we go nearly as far with our presidents. We demand to know—and, on top of that, we guard them so zealously that it becomes a significant budget item if they move at all.
For President Obama to take his wife to dinner in New York—I’ve made the trip by car, plane and train many times; for a private citizen it’s not a big deal—it required flying two huge airplanes (one of them carrying his armored limousine) and scrambling some escorting air force jets.
You or I could probably make the roundtrip nearly every week for a year for the cost of his one night out. (And he really isn’t given the choice to use public transportation or his own car.) That’s a lot of tax payers’ dollars for one dinner, one show.
He also picked an unfortunate weekend. General Motors is poised to enter bankruptcy just this following Monday morning. Tens of thousands—to millions—of American wage-earners are caught in a sudden, so recently, unimaginable limbo by this.
Vast wage pools, huge tax bases, all up in the air. No one can say for certain where it will all come down or in what form or on whose back. Fifty years ago GM was featured on the cover of TIME magazine as the ultimate corporation—twice the size of any other in the world.
Now, in a development that Ralph Nader concedes would have been beyond his “wildest imagination”, GM is going broke. It will shed nameplates; it will close factories and dealerships; it will shed workers and cut wages and/or benefits for the survivors.
As people with experience with bankrupt corporations will tell you, even among those companies who come out the other side of Chapter 11 still alive, many often don’t last another five years. For a nation that won the last World War simply by outproducing everyone else, the fall of General Motors is not a small thing! We have no idea what the ultimate consequences may be.
It is a truly ghastly moment in American corporate history. As a catastrophe it probably outstrips Pearl Harbor. June 1st may well become another infamous day to remember.
In short, the thought of the president and his lady spending huge amounts of money to go out for a single evening just before this bankruptcy suggests a “tin ear” in a politician. Surprising in a man who won so skillfully last year.
There is almost the feeling of a Nero fiddling while Rome crashes and burns around him. That is not a wise image for a politician to cultivate. It just might come back to haunt Mr. Obama.
Some other evening when the news is not so dire. Or, drive the secret service nuts—take a walk. Have a pizza in Georgetown. Take in a movie there or a show in Washington. Do what a smart businessman does—find a business reason to travel to New York. Then go to a show.
Much as I’m sympathetic with the desire to escape 1600 Pennsylvania, this was a misstep.