The Obamas’ date night
The Obamas probably already knew this, but there’s no such thing as the president of the United States and the first lady “sneaking off” anywhere to do anything. The Obama’s recent weekend dash to New York City for dinner and a Broadway show were described by some that way. But no, the Obamas’ days of skipping out to the malt shop for a quick, intimate date are over.
The Washington Times estimates the New York sojourn might have cost taxpayers $250,000 once you include the helicopter trips (including decoys) from the White House to Andrews Air Force Base and from John F. Kennedy Airport to a Manhattan helipad. You’d also have the Washington-to-New York flight itself, including accompanying Air Force fighter jets and a huge military cargo plane to carry motorcade vehicles. Then there’s Secret Service, local police and other security personnel. And the list goes on.
The Times notes the Obamas probably paid for the cost of dinner and the show, maybe a few hundred dollars at most. In fairness, the president and his family can’t walk around the block without a lot of the aforementioned security people involved, so some of the New York expense would’ve been incurred even if the Obamas spent a weekend at Camp David watching Netflix.
Yet, flights on aircraft that guzzle jet fuel like there’s no tomorrow quickly jack up this trip’s cost and, as Joseph Curl of The Times points out, recall Obama’s criticism of CEOs who jet around the country on corporate planes that are so unavailable to most Americans — as is the ability to scoot off to the Big Apple for a dinner/date.
Titanic link
Millvina Dean was nine weeks old when her mother lowered her into one of the Titanic’s lifeboats in a canvas mail sack. For most of her 97 years on this earth she struggled with the fascination others held for her story. Dean died Sunday in Southampton, England — the Titanic’s port of departure in 1912 — the “unsinkable” ocean liner’s last surviving passenger. She also was the final human link to an era of hubris, before two world wars and the Holocaust, when people believed they could solve the world’s problems — embodied in a ship of steel that couldn’t be sunk.
Dean lived in obscurity for decades after the tragedy. She lived quietly mainly because she didn’t want to be seen as attracting attention to herself and because everything she knew about the Titanic disaster was told her by her mother. “Nobody knew about me and the Titanic, to be honest, nobody took any interest, so I took no interest either,” she told The New York Times last month. “But then they found the wreck (in 1985), and after they found the wreck, they found me.”
It was a bittersweet sea change in the life of a woman who considered herself “such an ordinary person,” as Dean told The Times. The wreck’s discovery, then the blockbuster 1997 movie (which she never saw) raised her profile but also brought painful reminders of the loss of her father, one of Titanic’s 1,517 fatalities. Like the sinking’s other victims, he lost his life as part of the quest to build bigger, faster and stronger — in the mistaken belief nothing could outsize the ingenuity of mankind.
