Michelle Obama is taking a lot of heat for her Spanish vacation. Rumors are it is polling badly, and the White House is in full spin-control mode trying to contain the damage with the “inside story” that the trip was a sympathetic favor to a grieving personal friend of the First Lady. But having hectored Americans about avoiding extravagance in these difficult economic times, the Obamas left themselves wide open to this criticism.
Obama’s defenders think his critics are overdoing it out of purely partisan motivations and should lay off. Maybe so, but it is worth recalling that liberals and the media made a huge fuss about President Reagan’s five-day vacation in Barbados in 1982 (which came on top of the huge fuss about Nancy Reagan’s new White House china and fancy wardrobe, albeit privately funded in both cases). An AP story noted, “President Reagan is determined to go ahead with plans for an Easter holiday in Barbados despite advice from aides that a trip to a Caribbean resort island might be politically unwise during a deepening recession, White House sources said Saturday.” “The Image Problem of Reagan’s Escape” blared the Boston Globe, which noted the high cost of the president’s necessary communications and security entourage.
“So why do I get the feeling that the whole country’s struggling to stay afloat while Reagan sips a mint julep on a Barbados beach?” wrote columnist Bob Welch in the Bend (Oregon) Bulletin. “Nobody on food stamps, nobody who just got laid off at the mill, nobody’s who’s been trying to sell his house for 18 months wants to hear about Nancy Reagan’s six-figure china set or $8 million inaugurations.” “Surely few recent presidents have spent a holiday in such exotic surroundings, and Mr. Reagan has more than once betrayed a certain discomfort at being here in the tropics at a time when parts of the United States are still struggling to get out of the grip of winter,” wrote Steven Weisman in the New York Times. “It is not clear just whose idea this vacation was, since many on the White House staff are known to have opposed it on political grounds.”
Sauce for the goose, as the old saying goes.
Steven F. Hayward is the F. K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow at AEI, where Hiwa Alaghebandian is a research assistant.
Image by Reagan Library