Sequestration: No more White House tours

last updated 8 January 2015

“They’re rolling up the welcome mat at the White House,” said Joseph Straw in the New York Daily News. As part of the $85 billion in mandatory, across-the-board federal budget cuts called “sequestration,” the Obama administration has canceled all public tours of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The move, said the White House, would save $74,000 a week on Secret Service staffing. Since White House tours are arranged through congressional offices, Republican legislators are furious, accusing Obama of deliberately picking popular programs to cut so as to turn voters against sequestration. “The suspension of these tours reeks of political calculation,” said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), who suggested Obama cancel his golf outings instead.

Poor, poor President Obama, said Charles C.W. Cooke in NationalReview.com. He’s now so “strapped for cash” he’s been forced to ban the people from “the home he’s borrowing from them.” Of course he couldn’t bear to sack the three White House calligraphers ($277,050 a year) or the chief of staff to the president’s dog ($102,000 a year) or to ground Air Force One ($181,757 for every hour it’s aloft). God forbid that Obama should live “like the president of a republic instead of a king.” This “sheer pettiness” from our “Sequesterer in Chief” is sure to backfire, said Kimberley A. Strassel in The Wall Street Journal. He’s given us an open invitation “to dive into the gory depths of the federal budget,” and pinpoint dumb spending that deserves to be axed instead. To start, how about the $27 million spent to fund Moroccan pottery classes?

Let’s not pretend sequestration is about sensible budget cuts, said Alex Koppelman in NewYorker.com. Republicans have seized on this clumsy mechanism for political leverage over Obama, and the White House’s canceling of the tours is his own bit of “gamesmanship.” And if cuts must be made, surely it’s better to let down a few tourists than “furlough some hardworking people?” But if Obama is suddenly going to be so thrifty, said Paul Roderick Gregory in Forbes.com,then he surely can’t go on wasting precious Secret Service overtime on White House parties and “date nights” with Michelle. In fact, he’ll have to cancel the upcoming big bash for Michelle’s 50th birthday party, for which Beyoncé and Adele were reportedly booked to perform. Sometimes, even master manipulators “can be too smart for their own good.”