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Obamas' night out: First WH anniversary

by Mark Silva
(and updated Sunday, at 4 pm EDT, with a reflection on vitiriol.)

Barack and Michelle Obama are, among other things, husband and wife. And tonight, they celebrated their 17th anniversary, their first in the White House.

The president and first lady went out.

At 7:40 pm EDT, the presidential motorcade stopped in front of Blue Duck Tavern in the West End of Washington, between Dupont Circle and Georgetown.

"Taste cannot be controlled by law,'' Thomas Jefferson is said to have said -- it says so at the Blue Duck Tavern's Web-site.

The restaurant at 24th and M specializes in classic American fare, with a wood-burning oven. We have no idea what the first couple ordered, But the seared striped bass goes for $24, the braised wreckfish $26.

He wore a dark suit. She wore a black dress.

At 9:15 pm, with a few passersby, including a handful of Washington firefighters, straining for a view and showing digital cameras, the first couple left the restaurant.

He waved.

They were back at the White House at 9:32 pm.

That a simple date at a relatively modestly priced Washington restaurant to celebrate a wedding anniversarythe first for the first couple in the White Housecould generate as much venom as it has in these e-pages (see the comments below) on a Sunday suggests something deeply troubling about the American mood.

The timing of Saturday night's anniversary dinner for President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obamaat a juncture when several American soldiers have fallen at war in Afghanistanappears to have raised a lot of ire today.

However, we don't recall past White Houses in modern times canceling lavish state dinners at the presidential mansion, let alone simple runs of the motorcade to a nearby restaurant, during times of war.

And some of the vitriol appears to have drawn its inspiration from the fact that the president and his wife incurred some expense for the public in their outing. Yet any time that a president leaves the White House, a motorcade is launched, streets are secured and the Secret Service and area police swing into full protective mode.

If this president played the White House like a bunker, never leaving the grounds except for official business, he would no doubt be criticized for isolation and an insular lack of understanding about life outside. So this president has gone out for hamburgers, gone out for dinner and taken up golf on Sundays. He took his two young daughters for a tour of a couple of Washington's grandest monuments, the Jefferson and the Washington, last Sunday.

Unfortunately, and this is the most troubling footnote of today's run of criticism for the Obamas' night out, much of it is clearly inspired by something that the former president, Jimmy Carter, identified in his recent characterization of some of the most extreme criticism aimed at Obama during recent months: The inability of a lot of people to accept a black man as president.

In sifting through the hundreds of comments offered here today, we have had to withhold manydozens reallyfor their overt expressions of racism. That's sadnot that we've held them back, but that we even had to read them in the editing.

There's a lot of turmoil in the nation, with unemployment at a 26-year high, the military engaged in two wars and the public embroiled in heated debate over the role of government tat home, and there's a lot of anger as well

But it's time, we suggest, that a lot of people look a lot more closely at themselves before lashing out so feverishly at a middle-aged man and his wife going out to dinner for their 17th anniversary. Is it really the dinner?

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As President Obama and his top advisers consider their options in Afghanistan, the president's Democratic allies on Capitol Hill are in an awkward position. They say Obama needs time for that review. At the same time, the Senate is approving funding for the war without knowing troop levels, the strategy or the end game. And lawmakers' spending dilemmas are not limited to foreign policy. Last week they missed a deadline to pass a dozen annual spending bills. But they did manage to pass one — the one that funds Congress. Guest host Jacki Lyden talks with NPR congressional correspondent David Welna about what's ahead in Congress.