PrintJune 1, 2009
At a Certain Point
President Obama removed his class-warrior hat long enough to spend $74k on a date with the First Lady last weekend. The trip to New York to take in a Broadway show was a campaign promise the President made to his wife.
The RNC circulated an email slamming Obama for the insensitivity of his jet setting in light of GM’s pending (now academic) bankruptcy. Considering the trip’s price tag was about the salary of GM line worker and was tax-payer financed, the RNC has a point.
But the bigger story is Obama’s own commentary on such extravagance. This from page 193 of his biography, The Audacity of Hope:
At a certain point one has enough, …you can derive as much pleasure from a Picasso hanging in a museum as from one that's hanging in your den, …[and] you can get an awfully good meal in a restaurant for less than twenty dollars.
The real story is not insensitivity but hypocrisy. To paraphrase Obama, you can derive as much pleasure from a stage show playing in DC as one on Broadway.
Like Obama’s scathing rebuke of his own spending policies, his preaching on having “enough” means nothing to him -- just a lot of worthless words followed by massive price tags.
