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Dan
Calabrese
Read Dan's bio and previous columns here
August 3, 2009
Obama the Tacky
‘Ethics’ Scold
President Obama promised he would bring change to the White House. And
if you get invited to lunch there, you’d better bring some too. Because
you’re going to get handed a bill.
As
reported on Friday by Politico, Obama recently surprised the CEOs
of Xerox, Coca-Cola, AT&T and Honeywell International when, upon their
arrival for a presidential lunch to which they had been invited, White
House staff began collecting their credit card numbers. Why? Because
they were being charged for their meals.
You knew he was extremely liberal. You knew he was maybe just a little
impressed with himself. Did you know he was tacky?
Granted, the styrofoam Greek columns in Denver might have been a clue,
and the same could be said for the presidential plane buzzing a
terrified midtown Manhattan for a photo-op. Come to think of it, those
DVDs he gave Gordon Brown that don’t play in the UK? And giving the
queen an iPod for a gift?
OK, I suppose the evidence of Obama’s tackiness is incontrovertible
after all. But there’s something about this lunch-bill business that
seems particularly egregious, and perhaps more relevant in demonstrating
how Obama sees the world and those in it.
The explanation the White House offered was exceedingly silly, but as
someone who has worked in and around journalism for 25 years, I’ve heard
it before:
“From time to time, White House guests are asked to reimburse for their
meals, the reasons include ensuring there is no conflict or appearance
of a conflict,” said White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told Politico.
“That is consistent with our tough ethics rules and we will continue the
practice when appropriate.”
The idea here is that, if you let someone pay for your lunch, you will
feel beholden to them. A lot of newspapers have rules like this for
their reporters, and some of them take the rules to ridiculous extremes.
When I was a reporter for the Grand Rapids Business Journal, I
would sometimes cover events alongside reporters from the Grand
Rapids Press, who were not even allowed to accept a cup of coffee on
the theory that they would somehow feel they owed the provider of the
coffee a favor, and thus could not report on them objectively.
This is every bit as dumb as it seems. Imagine a city councilman calling
up a reporter and demanding: “How dare you quote one of my
critics! You drank free coffee at my meeting!” But it stems from two
things. One is the haughty self-importance of much of the press, who are
so taken by their own essentialness that they’re convinced people are
trying to buy their favor with crappy instant coffee in paper cups. The
other is a view of human nature that is so cynical that – well, we’ve
come to expect it from the press, but is this really the way we want our
president to think of us?
Inviting someone to your home (or office, as the case may be) for lunch,
and providing the meal on your own dime, is simple common courtesy. You
might hope for the invitation to be reciprocated at some point, but
otherwise no one who hosts such an event is going to expect guests to
feel beholden to them simply because they provided the meal. And no one
who is provided with such a meal – certainly not a CEO of a major
corporation – is going to think: “I owe that guy big-time now! He saved
me 25 bucks!”
Apparently the distinction between common courtesy and influence-buying
is lost on Obama, which is why he thinks that sticking his lunch guests
with a bill serves the cause of “ethics.”
And if this is Obama’s view of human nature, it’s no surprise he looks
so disapprovingly on free markets. Who wants to put their faith in a
market run by people who keep score and demand paybacks over a sandwich
and chips? That’s apparently Obama’s concept of how CEOs think.
I’ve long taken a dim view of “ethics” – a notion that strikes me as
little more than a do/don’t list for people who lack an inherent
appreciation of right and wrong. If you have this problem, you need to
live by carefully constructed rules – many of them insufferably silly –
to stay out of trouble. That’s how you end up charging your “guests” for
lunch at your house.
It’s been said: The ethical man knows he’s not supposed to cheat on his
wife. The moral man actually doesn’t. If this is too hard for the
president to get his brain around, I suppose he’ll need to keep his
rules handy.
© 2009 North Star
Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
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