thank God the new age bitch-witch didn't win...White House Ghosts
By Carl M. Cannon
November 8, 2008
Perhaps Barack Obama would like to have spent more time enjoying the eerie joys of Halloween with his little girls last weekend, except that the 2008 presidential election occupied his attention. Obama definitely still had the supernatural on his mind during his first post-victory press conference Friday, however. When he told reporters that he had consulted with all the “living” former presidents, and they tittered at the minor gaffe, he tried to recover by ad-libbing, “I didn’t want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about doing any séances.” This was a cheap shot—and inaccurate besides—and the President-elect (or someone on his staff) must have realized it immediately because before the day was out, Obama called Mrs. Reagan to apologize.
To set the record straight: Former White House chief of staff Donald T. Regan, perhaps under pressure to justify his $1 million book advance, revealed in his 1990 auto-biography that after her husband was wounded by a would-be assassin in his first months in office, a distraught Nancy Reagan began consulting astrologers before approving the president’s travel schedule. A bit unusual, but quite a different proposition than communing with the dead. That province was visited by a first lady, Mary Todd Lincoln, the wife of a president Obama often invokes. But she had her reasons, too. Mrs. Lincoln, mourning the death of her beloved son Willie, once held a séance at the White House in which a Washington “medium” attempted to help her communicate with the sweet boy.
Or perhaps Obama had in the back of his normally supple mind another former First Lady: That would be one Hillary Rodham Clinton, now the junior senator from New York, and the woman he spent 18 months running against for president. As part of an earlier Clinton campaign for the White House—Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election run—Mrs. Clinton consulted spiritualists of her own. Or, so said Bob Woodward in “The Choice,” his book about the Clintons 1996 re-election campaign. Apparently, Mrs. Clinton was trying to channel her heroine, Eleanor Roosevelt.
Loose Cannon’s own opinion is that it’s lonely at the top, and that if occasional flights of fancy by the president or the president's spouse help the First Couple cope with the stress of the job—well, what’s the harm? Personally, I care more about the level of consultation between the economic teams of the President-elect and the sitting president. And if these folks would just not make any verbal miscues for 24 hours or so, I could blog on it. Perhaps I can do this tomorrow: I’ll consult my horoscope and see.
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