As usual, Maureen Dowd’s latest musings in the pages of the once-august New York Times — she’s writing in the same space where collosi like Flora Lewis and “Red” Tony Lewis once trod! — are a free-range mental mix of banal social observation, half-baked politics and quotes from famous movies (doesn’t she know that’s Frank Rich’s job?). Still, there’s a barb or two aimed at Barry that ought to please discriminating tastes:
The Oval Office, the classiest, most powerful place on earth, is now suffused with browns and beiges and leather and resembles an upscale hotel conference room or a ’70s conversation pit with a boxy coffee table that even some Obama aides find ugly.
It almost made me long for the Technicolor Belle Watling swagging and swathing style of the Clintons’ Little Rock decorator, Kaki Hockersmith.
The recession redo, paid for by the nonprofit White House Historical Association, was the latest tone-deaf move by a White House that was supposed to excel at connection and communication. Message: I care, but not enough to stop the fancy vacations and posh renovations.
As Obama himself said in February 2009 when he released his first budget: “There are times where you can afford to redecorate your house, and there are times where you need to focus on rebuilding the foundation.”
It might have been wise, given America’s slough of despond, to hark back to a time when presidents just went to work and took their office pretty much as they found it, without the need to make a personal statement. As the former White House curator Rex Scouten once told me, in the era from Taft to Truman, the green rug in the president’s office was changed only once, when it wore out, to a new green rug.
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Guess he changed his mind.
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