Opinion: President makes foray to Condi Rice’s for final Sunday dinner
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
On his second-to-last night in the White House, President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, went out to dinner.
Not a restaurant, of course.
As the presidential motorcade made its way across town from the White House, less than two days before the inauguration of the next president, that very man, Barack Obama, and his family had arrived back in Blair House just across the street from their about-to-be-abode. They spent an afternoon of entertainment, speechifying and celebration on the National Mall, televised on HBO. See our video and photo reports on those events here and the celebratory aftermath in Washington’s streets here.
The Bushes went over to Secretary of State Condi Rice’s apartment in the Watergate complex. Bush has been close to Rice since way before he even announced his campaign in 1999 and recently said she was ‘like my sister.’
As we noted on The Ticket another recent time when Rice had a famous guest over to eat, the Alabama native is known for making a mean fried chicken. No word from the White House on who else might have been there Sunday night.
At 8:30, the early-to-bed-early-to-rise president left the Watergate and proceeded to Glen Echo Park in Maryland for an unannounced stop at a party for some 600 current and former White House staffers hosted by chief of staff Josh Bolten and former COS Andrew Card. The GOP seemed to have ceded the District of Columbia to celebrating Democrats this week.
Wild partygoer that he is, the president stayed five minutes and was tucked back into the White House by 9:18 p.m., according to the pool report by Sheryl Stolberg of the N.Y. Times. Others up and simply left the region altogether.
-- Andrew Malcolm
Speaking of conservatives, we’ll have conservatively-priced -- that is to say, free -- coverage of the real Obama inauguration and the new administration. Register here for cellphone alerts on each new Ticket item. RSS feeds are also available here. And we’re now on Amazon’s Kindle as well.