The Wrath of Grapes
By TIMOTHY EGAN
NYT
We know from a rare personal admission that Mitt Romney experienced a faint whiff of alcohol, a long, long time ago. “I tasted a beer and tried a cigarette once as a wayward teenager,” he said last November, “and never tried it again.”
No doubt, Romney has friends who own multinational breweries. But he would fail the presidential beer test — that is, whom would you most like to sip suds with — simply because his Mormon faith prohibits drinking alcohol. But then, he would also fail the presidential cookie test, as he showed in another awkward appearance with real people last week.
I’ve always thought the beer buddy threshold was nonsense. Still, it’s worth considering what a White House without a tippling tenant would be like. Sobriety, laudable in many respects, does imply rigidity of thought. The best presidents were open-minded, and generally open to a drink. The nondrinkers, at least over the last century or so, were terrible presidents.
The last president to swear off alcohol was George W. Bush, who seems doomed to have his name forever followed by the words, “and we know how that turned out.” During his misspent youth, W. was a heavy drinker and considered quite the cutup, but was also obnoxious, smashing his car into trash cans and challenging his father to go “mano a mano.”
(More here.)
NYT
We know from a rare personal admission that Mitt Romney experienced a faint whiff of alcohol, a long, long time ago. “I tasted a beer and tried a cigarette once as a wayward teenager,” he said last November, “and never tried it again.”
No doubt, Romney has friends who own multinational breweries. But he would fail the presidential beer test — that is, whom would you most like to sip suds with — simply because his Mormon faith prohibits drinking alcohol. But then, he would also fail the presidential cookie test, as he showed in another awkward appearance with real people last week.
I’ve always thought the beer buddy threshold was nonsense. Still, it’s worth considering what a White House without a tippling tenant would be like. Sobriety, laudable in many respects, does imply rigidity of thought. The best presidents were open-minded, and generally open to a drink. The nondrinkers, at least over the last century or so, were terrible presidents.
The last president to swear off alcohol was George W. Bush, who seems doomed to have his name forever followed by the words, “and we know how that turned out.” During his misspent youth, W. was a heavy drinker and considered quite the cutup, but was also obnoxious, smashing his car into trash cans and challenging his father to go “mano a mano.”
(More here.)
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