Is George W. Bush afraid of black people's cooties, as the R&B singer famously suggested on live national TV a year ago? It's an explosive charge, and there's only anecdotal evidence to back it up — such as this memory of an African-American visitor to the White House:
On his first meeting at the White House, he remembers shaking the hand of the president, who turned to "an aide nearby, who squirted a big dollop of hand sanitizer in the president’s hand."
The visitor in question? Senator Barack Obama, who recounts the episode in a memoir due out next month.
The Senator has impeccable manners. "Not wanting to seem unhygienic," Obama writes, he then also "took a squirt."
Actually, no. Experienced politician's aides, at least here in the US, always carry hand sanitizer for their bosses. Politicians shake so many hands on a daily basis that if they do not, they are continually catching all sorts of bugs and colds and what-not.
Mary Chaney, who wrote a memoir of life on the campaign trial with Dick Cheney, relates this was one of her most important jobs working for her Dad.
I would be highly surprised to find Obama, who is after all a Senator, doesn't know this fact very well and trusts that his readers will not.
Posted by: Lana | Wednesday, September 20, 2006 at 07:09 PM