President
Obama's perfect, four-hour homecoming Thursday included exulting in a
Chicago White Sox no-hitter and raising around $3 million. But what was
in it for your garden variety rich American?
Well,
at the North Side home of Penny Pritzker, a close Obama chum and super
fundraiser, there was a large, if culinarily unimaginative,
early-evening buffet dinner, according to resourceful Mike Flannery, a
reporter for Chicago's WBBM-TV and the best political journalist in
town.
A
highly-placed kitchen source told Mike that the buffet for the 100
attendees included rack of lamb, beef tenderloin; Ahi tuna; crab cakes;
mushroom tart; lobster and shrimp jambalaya; flat breads with chutney
and goat cheese; and rice crackers and seaweed salad.
Mike,
a cerebral Georgetown University graduate, will admit to not being a
potential contestant on Bravo's "Top Chef." But my Pulitzer
Prize-winning wife, a bonafide ace cook, sniffed that it sounded "like
a buffet at Houlihan's." Ouch. That's a decidedly uninspired downtown
restaurant that's a slight improvement over T.G.I Friday's. Then,
again, she studied cooking in Paris.
As
for dessert, it included tea cookies; fruit finger tarts; chocolate
mousse; mini-cheesecakes; strawberries and blueberries; and chocolate
éclair. Again, it wasn't Alinea, a nearby restaurant deemed the best in
America by Gourmet magazine. But so what?
"You don't spend $15,000 for dinner," said Norman Bender, a plumbing magnate from Woodbridge, Conn., among guests who came from across the land and, in one case, London. "We got to speak to the President of the United States."
But
before you did, you apparently had to watch highlights prepared for
Obama of that afternoon's rare perfect game pitched by White Sox star
Mark Buehrle. Obama, if you didn't know, is a Sox diehard. But since
there was at least one woman who came all the way from London, I could
only wonder about perhaps being a cricket fan and paying $15,000 to see
the President, only to face the obligation of watching video of a sport
you had no clue about.
Regardless,
folks did have a chance to speak to, and have a picture taken
with, Obama. And, at least in one case, there was the opportunity to
exhibit some nerve.
The
interview wound up on the cutting room floor due to time constraints
but Flannery did buttonhole Chicagoan Sheldon Baskin, who indicated
that he'd confronted Obama on U.S. criticism of the coup that ousted
Honduran President Manuel Zelaya. If you recall, Obama was very public
and immediate in justifiably denouncing the action as illegal.
So that meant Baskin was making an argument for the coup?
At
that point that Flannery raised his own assumption, the lady at
Baskin's side interrupted. "Shelly, Shelly, don't talk about it!" she
apparently declared.
But, wait. So how did the President respond, Baskin was asked.
"He disagreed," Baskin said.
Obama
spent about 90 minutes at the apparently gorgeous Pritzker house before
heading to a less intimate hotel fundraiser, then back to Washington.
But he clearly reinforced the loyalty at the economic apex of his
political base. What can be the reflexive journalistic penchant to ooh
and aah over a $15,000 price of entry was dismissed by plumbing magnate
Bender.
"Nobody in there was spending the college fund," he reported.
Of course, curmudgeons and Blue Dog Democrats would probably get dyspeptic over such distribution of funds on anything.
Now,
if Obama, Rahm Emanuel et al. can only be as efficient in dealing with
the Blue Dogs on health care as Buehrle was with the Tampa Bay Devil
Rays (dispatched in a wonderfully brief two hours and three minutes), there's hope for success on that front.
Of course, the growing Washington
conventional wisdom is that Obama has played his cards wrong on health
care. Relax. It's early. The D.C. echo chamber is running amok.
Hey, a left-hander selected in the 38th round of the baseball draft in 1998, meaning his prospects were slim to none, pitched his second no-hitter Thursday.
(Photo: Pete Souza/Official Presidential Portrait)
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2009/07/what-do-you-get-for-a-15-000-dinner-with-the-president-try-crab-cakes-baseball-highlights-and-a-chance-to-debate-the-honduran-coup/22025/
