POLITICAL COTTON CANDY: Plus ca change...

January 28, 2009

Plus ca change...

Big news out of 1600 Pennsylvania today? Sure, something about a stimulus. Yeah, there may have been some discussion of the president nearing a decision about continued strategy in Iraq. Yep, Secretary Gates mentioned something about troop allocations to Afghanistan. But all these things get in the way of the big development, which is that ....

Booze is back!

That's right, the Teetotaler-in-Chief has ridden (or flown) off into the Texas sunset, and the new gun in town likes to imbibe like the rest of us. Slate has a neat little piece about the development, which manages to talk about why this development is actually important (in a slightly tongue-in-cheek manner) and at the same time, put the practice in historic context. Clearly, this was not a piece written by Jacob Weisberg.

In case you don't like to do the whole "click on links and read things" thing, here's what I think is the best paragraph of the entire article, talking about LBJ's penchant for booze:

After Kennedy, LBJ carried on the presidential carrying on, though in his own inimitable style. Joseph Califano tells the story of drinking while riding around Lyndon Johnson's ranch. "As we drove around we were followed by a car and a station wagon with Secret Service agents. The president drank Cutty Sark scotch and soda out of a large white plastic foam cup. Periodically, Johnson would slow down and hold his left arm outside the car, shaking the cup and ice. A Secret Service agent would run up to the car, take the cup and go back to the station wagon. There another agent would refill it with ice, scotch, and soda as the first agent trotted behind the wagon. Then the first agent would run the refilled cup up to LBJ's outstretched and waiting hand, as the president's car moved slowly along."

There are little ditties in there about JFK (as hinted at above), Nixon, Truman, U.S. Grant, and a priceless reference to one hell of a party thrown by the Framers after they called the convention during which they swapped out the Articles of Confederation for the eponymous Constitution. So, all in all, a nice assortment for those of us that measure history in months and those that do it in centuries.

For those of you that may be aghast at all this changiness going on, fear not - some songs remain the same. While everyone else was focusing on the booze and the bullets and the bailouts, the intrepid Ben Feller of the AP noticed that despite the change in administrations, one continuity persists: people in the White House still abuse the heck out of baseball metaphors.