Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous

A few columns ago our theological musings about humankind’s enduring desire for royalty provoked a comment from disgruntled reader, who rather snippily disputed our observation “That to say President Barack Obama lives like a king understates the matter by many millions of dollars.” He didn’t dispute the point so much as the “link,” which led to a report that the United States spends 20 times more money on the Obamas than the British do on their royal family, and to back up his dudgeon he provided a “link” of his own to a Washington Post “fact check” that reported the disparity is somewhat less than that. The Washington Post’s fact checkers are apparently the indisputable arbiters of truth on these matters, so we’ll concede the orders of magnitude, but we will not relent from our contention that the Prez is living awfully large.

This statement is a subjective opinion rather than objective fact, and therefore beyond the purview of the almighty Post’s almighty fact-checkers, but there is an abundance of anecdotal evidence to support it. The latest example, and the one that prompted this rant, is the president’s decision to have his dog flown into the family’s Martha Vineyard vacation on an especially expensive military aircraft. That’s royal treatment by any nation’s standards, and there is nothing on the internet that will convince us otherwise.

The news about the presidential dog comes courtesy of London’s Telegraph, because reporting embarrassing revelations about Obama is work that the American media won’t do, and the article includes several other intriguing tidbits about the cost of the latest presidential vacation. Among other amenities, the $7.5 million mansion where the Obamas are staying include a nine-acre grounds, basketball court, and such well-heeled neighbors as Ted “Cheers” Danson and Carly “You’re So Vain” Simon. Even as loyal subjects of the queen, the Telegraph’s scribes seem struck by the extravagance of it all.

Such conspicuous consumption goes largely unremarked here in the United States, however, at least in recent years. There used to be ample criticism of George W. Bush’s August retreats to his family ranch in Crawford, Texas, especially from the reporters who were forced to follow him to that sun-baked outpost of the hardscrabble prairie, but in the age of Obama a certain degree of presidential opulence is now regarded as appropriate by the chattering classes. In the early days of Obama’s presidency the press even reported his taxpayer-funded frolics with an undisguised awe, as if the glamorous days of John Kennedy’s “Camelot” had at long last returned, but lately they just look for something else to fill the summer lull in the news.

Perhaps that’s because they realize how bad it looks to people struggling to get by in a low-growth, high-unemployment economy. The president will eventually return from vacation to resume his constant castigation of the rich folks he blames for the nation’s woes, and offer the old reassurances about his feelings of solidarity with the common man, and continue to argue that the miniscule budget cuts imposed by the “sequester” are making life unbearable for such humble public servants as himself, so widespread news reports about the presidential pooch flying first-class a millionaires-only enclave in an MV-22 Osprey won’t help the effort.

He’ll still have plenty of defenders who will talk of how hard he works and quibble over the cost estimates and recall the old tale of the dog on the top of Mitt Romney’s car roof, but the hypocrisy will be hard for more objective observers to miss.

— Bud Norman