The Telegraph reports that President Obama gave British Prime Minister Gordon Brown a nice collection of movies on DVD’s:

Barack Obama ‘too tired’ to give proper welcome to Gordon Brown…Sources close to the White House say Mr Obama and his staff have been “overwhelmed” by the economic meltdown and have voiced concerns that the new president is not getting enough rest…A well-connected Washington figure, who is close to members of Mr Obama’s inner circle, expressed concern that Mr Obama had failed so far to “even fake an interest in foreign policy”…

The real views of many in Obama administration were laid bare by a State Department official…The official dismissed any notion of the special relationship, saying: “There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.”…

British diplomats…concede that the mood music of the event was at times strained. Mr Brown handed over carefully selected gifts, including a pen holder made from the wood of a warship that helped stamp out the slave trade — a sister ship of the vessel from which timbers were taken to build Mr Obama’s Oval Office desk. Mr Obama’s gift in return, a collection of Hollywood film DVDs that could have been bought from any high street store, looked like the kind of thing the White House might hand out to the visiting head of a minor African state.

The Telegraph gave Obama a bit too much credit: “In addition to passing the largest stimulus package and the largest budget in US history, Mr Obama is battling a plummeting stock market.” That’s not true. According to his own account, Obama doesn’t pay attention to the stock market.

This is a small story, but contains disturbing elements. Diplomatic protocol in such visits shouldn’t change from one administration to the next. Is Obama’s senior staff incompetent? How then did they get their jobs? Or is it true that Britain is not important to Obama? And what’s up with the DVD’s? That’s beyond embarrassing. That shows that no one, including the President, thought to ask what was the usual gift in such visits. You’d think it would be hard to be so clueless.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 12:36 am and is filed under Democrats, EU, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.