More on Obama’s diss of British PM
PRESIDENT Obama’s first hosting of a foreign leader, the UK’s Gordon Brown, was a diplomatic disaster.
Obama failed to hold a joint Rose Garden press conference, the usual protocol when a US president and a British prime minister first meet - a lapse widely noted in Britain and in the diplomatic community. This raised real fears that Obama intends to de-emphasize the decades-old US-UK “special relationship” - fears that seemed confirmed when the White House press secretary referred to a “special partnership.”
Also notable were the two leaders’ choices for the traditional gift exchange: Brown’s carefully chosen official gifts included a pen holder made from a Royal Navy vessel that once fought to end the Atlantic slave trade and a first edition of the eight-volume biography of Winston Churchill begun by Winston’s son Randolph and completed by Sir Martin Gilbert. Obama paid him back with a stack of Hollywood movies on DVD that Brown could just as easily have ordered from Netflix.