Obama's Turkey Pardon and scandalous presidential daughters

[Barry]

Here's Obama's Thanksgiving message, nothing profound but show's The Prez being his charming and witty self. This made a bit more news than usual because a Republican senatorial aide dissed his daughters, not to mention their mom and dad, and later resigned.

And while we're on the topic of presidential daughters, I'm including a good article about TR's (Teddy Roosevelt's) scandalous one.




A Presidential Daughter You Could Pick On

Alice Roosevelt Longworth was the sassiest offspring ever to occupy the White House.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/st...#ixzz3L30llhwS

Elizabeth Lauten’s biggest problem, perhaps, was that she picked on the wrong White House daughters. Following her pious hectoring of Malia Obama, 16, and her sister Sasha, 13—for merely looking a bit bored and wearing short skirts at the presidential pardon of a turkey—Lauten not only finds herself out of a job but also with her reputation badly damaged from a report in the Smoking Gun that she was arrested for shoplifting when she was 17, a year older than Malia is now.

If only Lauten, the former communications director to Tennessee Republican Rep. Stephen Fincher, had been around in Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s day. Now there was a presidential daughter you could say nasty things about! Teddy Roosevelt’s first-born remains the sassiest daughter ever to live in the White House—especially compared with the two Obama girls, who have managed to get through nearly six years in the White House fishbowl without committing, to my knowledge, a single public indiscretion. Even today, some 100-plus years later, Alice’s teenage antics remain decidedly unconventional—and wholly criticizable. During her long life—she died in 1980, age 96—she never apologized or tried in any way to ameliorate them; in fact, as an old lady, she loved to regale visitors to her famous DuPont Circle teas with descriptions of her bad behavior and rebelliousness.

Lauten would have gotten away with calling out Alice’s public lapses. The press covered her closely, as I discovered when I wrote her biography in the mid-1980s. I spent weeks perusing microfilm at the Washingtoniana collection at the D.C. Public Library and I read every one of her letters at the Alice Roosevelt Longworth Collection at the Library of Congress. If reporters or editors had any qualms back then about covering a presidential daughter—as they certainly do today; there is an unwritten rule, rarely broken, to leave White House children out of coverage—the stacks of news clips indicate that they suppressed those reservations. If there was a presidential-imposed zone of privacy erected around Alice, I didn’t find it when I was conducting interviews and research a hundred years after her birth and several years after her death.

Reporters described Alice’s romps and rebellion in vivid detail, often crowding off the front pages TR’s accomplishments; he was McKinley’s vice president, elected in 1900, and became president, in 1901, after McKinley’s assassination. The president and his wife (and Alice's stepmother), First Lady Edith, needed only to open their morning paper to read about Alice—a friend of Edith’s described Alice as “like a young wild animal that had been put into good clothes.” TR, running for a full term in 1904, feared that Alice’s escapades—smoking in public, chewing gum, wearing pants, racing her own car too fast down D.C. streets, sometimes with male passengers and always unchaperoned, placing bets on horses (a news photographer snapped her collecting her winnings from a bookie)—would hurt his reelection chances. As for Edith, she believed that a lady’s name should appear in print only to announce her birth, marriage and death.

Read more: https://www.politico.com/magazine/st...#ixzz3L31DiAaE