Thanks, Tom and aimai, for holding the fort while I was gone. (By the way, in reference to Tom's post about the four Tennessee legislators who are challenging Obama's citizenship, I recommend the posts at Tennessee Guerilla Women about one of the legislators, Stacey Campfield. Campfield, among other things, has compared the Tennessee Legislative Black Caucus unfavorably to the Ku Klux Klan and has argued that if Michael Vick had staged fetus fights instead of dogfights, he'd have beenh treated much more sympathetically.)
****
This morning I see that Lauri Reagan at the generally ignorable American Thinker site is whining about remarks in a two-week-old interview with the Obamas:
... Apparently Barack Obama had no idea that all of that hard work would actually be just that -- hard work. I suppose he thought the job of POTUS would be just as much fun as the two years he spent on the campaign trail.
... apparently, he is realizing that because after just two weeks of living in America's most famous mansion, what did the Obamas do? They escaped the stress of the job and ran to a local public elementary school to read books with seven year olds. According to the report,
"'We were just tired of being in the White House,' the president candidly told the gleeful second-graders at Capital City Public Charter School."
"'We got out! They let us out!' Mrs. Obama said as the kids and their teachers laughed."
...I find this scary. Great leaders do not say after just two weeks on the job that they are tired of being in their office. Great leaders do not complain...
Er, Lauri? Let's ignore the fact that this was a photo op, not a day off, and the fact that George W. Bush took an extraordinary number of days off. Do you know who used to complain like this all the time? I mean really complain?
Saint Reagan.
In fact (as Paul Slansky noted in his 1989 book about the Reagan years, The Clothes Have No Emperor), Reagan cooked up one specific complaint and repeated it to every interviewer he met.
August 1982:
President Reagan tells Time's Hugh Sidey that he sometimes feels trapped in the White House. "You glance out the window and the people are walking around Pennsylvania Avenue and you say, 'I could never say I am going to run down to the drugstore and get some magazines.'" he says. "I can't do that any more."
December 1982:
"Sometimes I look out there at Pennsylvania Avenue and see people bustling along, and it suddenly dawns on me that probably never again can I just say, 'Hey, I'm going down to the drugstore to look at the magazines.'"
--President Reagan discussing his feelings of confinement with a People reporter
Also December 1982:
"I sometimes look out the window at Pennsylvania Avenue and wonder what it would be like to be able to just walk down the street to the corner drugstore and look at the magazines. I can't do that anymore."
--President Reagan sharing a sudden thought with a radio interviewer
January 1984:
"You find yourself remembering what it was like when on the spur of the moment you could just yell to your wife that you were going down to the drugstore and get a magazine. You can't do that anymore."
--President Reagan telling Time a story he hasn't told the magazine in more than 17 months
(The interviews cited are here, here, here, and here.)
Lauri, this was the god-king! The more-than-human serene highness! Ronald Wilson Reagan! He got tired of being in the White House -- and couldn't buy a damn magazine to relieve his distress!
And yet I'm sure you believe that he ascended bodily into heaven when he died, and that his corpse did not decay. Right?
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