Forget, for a moment, GM and the Middle East. Barack Obama just made life a helluva lot harder for one already underperforming demographic: the husbands of America. His date-night foray to Manhattan with the First Lady was the sort of beau geste that most men could only dream about (if they even bothered to dream) but never pull off.
Sure, the president took some predictable, partisan heat from the Republican National Committee, which denounced the trip as frivolous almost before the government Gulfstream that served as a smaller-than-usual Air Force One had left the ground. But I’d bet anything that most regular people all around the country instantly got it: the man had promised his wife a Broadway show when the ordeal of the campaign was over, and he made good on his word.
Presidential travel has never been easy. Abraham Lincoln’s advisers were fit to be tied over the security risks when he decided to tour Richmond just days before the Civil War ended. Every time Franklin D. Roosevelt made the 10-hour train trip from Washington to his family home in Hyde Park, New York, hundreds, even thousands, of people got into the act. “For six hours before the president’s departure, all rail traffic was deflected from the tracks to be used, so that responsible railroad men could walk every yard of track, inspecting for cracks or broken switches,” Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote in No Ordinary Time. “In the areas adjacent to the tracks, all parked cars were removed, lest they prove hiding places for conspirators. Security agents tested the food and drinks as they were loaded into the dining car.”
Today’s White House let it be known that the president would have been more than happy to take the regular air shuttle to LaGuardia, but the Secret Service vetoed that idea. A simple effort by Joe Biden to ride the train home to Delaware a couple of weeks ago, as he did for years in the Senate, apparently caused logistical nightmares.
So give the first couple their due, which in this case involved a quiet dinner at Blue Hill (two martinis for the missus, wine with the tasting menu for him) and a pair of orchestra seats for Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, the story of a search for black identity in a Pittsburgh boarding house, circa 1911. I don’t begrudge the president one penny of whatever it cost of my taxpayer dollars to carry out his plan. I just worry about what it’s already cost me in the school of comparative spousal performance—and what it will yet cost me in any attempt to follow the president’s lead.
Todd S. Purdum, Vanity Fair
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Full article: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/politics/2009/06/obama-date-night-an-affront-to-lazy-slobs-everywhere.html
