How 'bout this one?...again indicates that the Reagans accepted a $2.5m home, 7,000+ square foot home in lovely Bel Air, Calif as a gift, WHILE IN OFFICE!!...Clinton's $190K pales in comparison here:
The Clintons' gift rap
As the first family leaves the White House, the political press can't help but deliver one more low blow.
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By Eric Boehlert
Jan. 30, 2001 | After eight years of warfare between the press and the White House, could the Clintons' stay have ended any other way? In an utterly predictable finale, reporters, busily concocting motivations and connecting fictitious dots, swooped in for one last pointless, and sloppy, appearance-of-impropriety bust.
The capital gang wasn't content to target the controversial last-minute pardons issued by the Clinton just before he turned off the Oval Office lights. No, pundits and reporters were incensed that the president and wife Hillary left the White House with $190,027 worth of personal gifts last year. Many were from deep-pocketed friends helping the Clintons adjust to private life after spending the last two decades living in the Arkansas governor's mansion and the White House.
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Now, $190,000 in gifts is surely a lot of goodies by anyone's standards, a bounty bound to raise eyebrows, since during the previous year the Clintons accepted just $23,602 worth of gifts. And if Bill and Hillary were to be tried for being politically tone-deaf, this would make an excellent Exhibit A (as would Hillary's decision to sign an $8 million book deal just weeks after winning her New York Senate race).
But the media's condemnations of the gifts were so swift, so visceral and so personal that they laid bare one last time an unchecked venom many in the political press simply cannot mask. And the truth got trashed along the way.
As with most of these tired rituals of outrage, critics admitted upfront that what the Clintons did was perfectly legal, but stressed it just wasn't right. The Washington Post weighed in with a tsk-tsking editorial: "The Clintons have no capacity for embarrassment. Words like shabby and tawdry come to mind. They don't begin to do it justice." New York Daily News columnist Michael Kramer practically popped a vein writing about the Clintons' parting gifts. Furious that "they stripped the White House," Kramer implied the "white trash" couple were "world class users" who lacked "a moral compass." The columnist insisted, "Most First Families view the gifts they get as the nation's property -- and leave town without them."
Actually, had Kramer done a hint of homework he would have discovered that during their four years in the White House, the previous occupants, President George and Barbara Bush, pocketed $144,000 worth of gifts. Not bad, considering those were recession years. Yet nobody suggests Poppy and Bar lacked a moral compass.
Meanwhile, excitable Fox News commentator Morton Kondracke fumed the "sleazy" Clintons had at worst "extorted," and at best "squeezed," the gifts out of contributors. Equally upset about the gifts, the San Francisco Chronicle editorialized that the Clintons' "graceless finale" had "carried the stench of scandal."
Was it the number -- $190,027 -- that sent so many people into a tizzy? If so, than perhaps this is all Dale Chihuly's fault. The renowned glass artist gave the Clintons one of his pieces worth $22,000. Then, Clinton's Georgetown alumni class of '68 gave the first couple a matching Chihuly basket set valued at $38,000. Those two items alone represent nearly one-third of the Clintons' gift take.
It seems strange that pundits were irked by a dollar figure since the press shrugged its collective shoulders when President Reagan allowed his wealthy friends to buy him and his wife Nancy a 7,192-square-foot house for $2.5 million on 1.25 acres of land in fashionable Bel Air, Calif., back in 1987. Yes, the Reagans eventually paid their friends back, but the sweetheart deal was struck two years before Ron and Nancy left the White House, setting up by today's standards a clear question of impropriety; what did Reagan's well-connected friends really want in exchange for their generosity? Back then, nobody cared. Yet imagine the caterwauling, not to mention the congressional investigations, had the Clintons dared such an exit. |
