Adele Ferguson - Should Obama travel before lame duck season? begin

IT ISN’T SO MUCH the cost of President Obama’s 10 day trip to Asia, it’s what’s he doing going over there in the first place?

Hasn’t he got enough to do here at home? He didn’t negotiate those airplane contracts with India, etc. That was all a done deal before Air Force One left the ground over here. Boeing simply allowed him the pomp and circumstance of being in on the signing.

At the rate he loves to travel, I suspect he’ll need a new Air Force One before he’s out of office whether it’s two more years or six. I don’t think he was home two days in a row in the last few months. He always managed, however, to slip some kind official doings into his schedule so he couldn’t be accused of using government issue for campaigning.

I think he and Michelle caught the Clinton fever. Bill and Hillary planned to visit every country in the world before they had to buy their own tickets and came close to doing it. They hadn’t been in office long before they and their aides in the White House were invited to cruise aboard an aircraft carrier I think it was. The Navy supplied everyone with fancy robes and towels, etc., and somehow the Clinton party got the notion these were gifts. They took the stuff with them when they left the ship and the Navy had to send someone to pick it all up again since this was the regalia kept on hand for use by important guests on guest cruises.

You’d think the Clintons would have known better by the time they moved from the White House to their new home and took a truckload of furniture, antiques, etc., owned by the taxpayers with them. That time it was the FBI that had to retrieve our things.

BILL SPENT $42 MILLION on a trip to Africa once, but that doesn’t make much of a dent in what Obama is spending if the stories about this Asia safari are true. Drudge and Fox News are both reporting the tab at $200 million a day along with claims that the Obamas are accompanied by 3,000 guests, 34 warships, 40 planes and two Marine helicopters flown over there dismantled and put together on arrival for use flying them around India. They also booked the entire Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in India for their group and explained it as showing faith in their friendship with India, considering Americans were killed in a bombing of the place some years back.

The Seattle Times ran a news story with a White House spokesman denial of the $200 million a day cost estimate but did not pursue getting a correct figure which information historically has been considered none of our business.

Taxpayers picked up the tab for security personnel and many aides and flunkies but it isn’t explained whether the business folk invited on the trip paid their own way. Lt. Gov. John Cherberg used to take trade missions overseas with business leaders, legislators and some newsmen invited. My husband and I went on some of them but we paid our own travel, hotel and food expenses.

WHAT YOU GAIN on a trip like this is exposure to the politicians of the countries visited and you get to be a guest at dinners put on for Cherberg. You also could go through customs without being checked as closely as when you aren’t a member of a big shot’s group.

But to get back to Obama, Congress is close to wrapping it up for the year, and it’s in those few weeks the ones who won’t be coming back in January try to get what pork they can while they’re still in office. Lame ducks don’t worry about irking the voters.

Obama, who does care, I think, should stay home and mind the store. I wonder whether that mysterious vapor from a missile, airplane or whatever, would have been appeared off the west coast if he hadn’t been out of the country.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa., 98340.)