The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
He’s So Hot, He’s Cool
“White House Unbuttons Formal Dress Code” reads a headline in today’s New York Times. President Obama was photographed without a jacket in the Oval Office the other day, “only the first of many signs that a more informal culture is growing up in the White House under new management. Mr. Obama promised to bring change to Washington and he has–not just in substance, but in presidential style.”
It turns out, though, that the interesting part of the story is not the contrast between the president and his stick-in-the-mud predecessor. Rather, it is why Obama doffed his jacket:
Mr. Obama, who hates the cold, had cranked up the thermostat.
“He’s from Hawaii, O.K.?” said Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, who occupies the small but strategically located office next door to his boss. “He likes it warm. You could grow orchids in there.”
This is hardly in keeping with candidate Obama’s declaration last May: “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times . . . and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK,” Obama said.” It’s good to be king.
To be sure, we’d much rather see the president of the United States in shirtsleeves than in a hair shirt. But if the Bush Oval Office had been hot enough to grow orchids in January, you can bet the Times’s coverage would have been a lot chillier.
Further, when it comes to the cold, Obama talks tougher than he acts. The Associated Press reports that he scoffed at his daughters’ school for calling a snow day yesterday:
“Can I make a comment that is unrelated to the economy very quickly?” the new president told reporters at a gathering with business leaders. “And it has to do with Washington. My children’s school was canceled today. Because of, what? Some ice?”
The president said he wasn’t the only one who was incredulous.
“As my children pointed out, in Chicago, school is never canceled,” Obama said to laughter. “In fact, my 7-year-old pointed out that you’d go outside for recess. You wouldn’t even stay indoors. So, I don’t know. We’re going to have to try to apply some flinty Chicago toughness.”
Asked if he meant the people of the national’s capital are wimps, Obama said: “I’m saying, when it comes to the weather, folks in Washington don’t seem to be able to handle things.”
Contrast this with Obama’s convention speech last year:
And when one of [John McCain’s] chief advisers–the man who wrote his economic plan–was talking about the anxiety Americans are feeling, he said that we were just suffering from a “mental recession,” and that we’ve become, and I quote, “a nation of whiners.”
A nation of whiners? Tell that to the proud auto workers at a Michigan plant who, after they found out it was closing, kept showing up every day and working as hard as ever, because they knew there were people who counted on the brakes that they made. Tell that to the military families who shoulder their burdens silently as they watch their loved ones leave for their third or fourth or fifth tour of duty. These are not whiners. They work hard and give back and keep going without complaint. These are the Americans that I know.
Where was that flinty Chicago toughness then?
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