White House Personal Shopper...I'm applying!
I've received my fair share of bad gifts over the years. My college boyfriend once gave me an exercise mat for Valentines Day so we could “work out together”. Whatever. Same boyfriend, different year, (I was young and stupid) gave me the free gift with purchase that came with his cologne - a Polo umbrella - as a birthday gift. That pretty much ended things.
This week I was reminded of my former college boyfriend, not by a photo or through a mutual friend on Facebook, but by the bungled gift giving mishaps of the White House.
Now anyone who knows anything about diplomacy (of the international or more intimate kind) knows that gifts are a pretty big deal. During a high level visit a "gift officer" will accept gifts on behalf of the official (unless the gift is to be given publicly), draft thank you letters, and present return gifts. No one wants to be presented something without having something equally grand prepared to give in return. These things generally happen behind the scenes and go off without a hitch.
It was unfortunate and a bit odd then, that in one day there were two serious faux pas involving U.S. gifts. First, Secretary Hillary Clinton presented a "reset button" to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Unfortunately for the United States, the button said "overcharge" instead of "reset". The highly publicized gift presentation ceremony went something like this:
Clinton: "We worked hard to get the correct Russian word. Did we get it?”
Lavrov: “You got it wrong."
Oh...sorry.
Meanwhile, President Obama was busy presenting British Prime Minister Gordon Brown with a collection of twenty-five DVDs of American classic films...like they don't have movies in England. In return, Prime Minister brought a much more thoughtful and appropriate gift, "an ornamental pen holder made from the timbers of the Victorian anti-slave ship HMS Gannet [the sister ship of the HMS Resolute, that provided the wood for a desk that has sat in the Oval Office for 200 years]." This is sort of like exchanging Valentines Day gifts and discovering that you gave your boyfriend a nice watch and he gave you, in return, an exercise mat.
I presume the White House protocol office has some "gift officer" in charge of making sure that gifts are properly reciprocated. My suspicion is that my ex-boyfriend landed that job. In any case, my plan for our weekly podcast is to present the new White House Gift Officer with a few websites that will help position the U.S. as leaders in Gift Giving Affairs, rather than “most likely to be re-gifted.”
