Back in March, Barack Obama, still giddy from his landslide victory over senior citizen John McCain, received Prime Minister Gordon Brown at the White House for a state visit. Gordon had been anxious to get away from the abysmal weather in England and welcomed the opportunity to slog through the comparatively balmy sleet and mud of springtime Washington, D.C. for a while. Obama for his part was eager to mend fences with the P.M. after reversing policy on George Bush’s “forever war” in Iraq. In the prerequisite gift exchange at the White House, Obama presented Brown with a complete set of John Wayne war movie DVD’s. It was only after returning to Britain that the prime minister discovered that the DVD’s were unwatchable on European players. “My bad,” said Obama in a subsequent phone conversation between the two national leaders. Thus it was a heightened sense of “getting it right this time” that dictated Obama’s choice of a gift to present to Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace during his visit, while attending the G-20 world summit on economic policy. How was he to know that the Ipod he proffered to the monarch was an unintentional re-gift? Obama had been given the 8 gigabyte multimedia player last year as a bawdy joke gift from Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, during the politician’s highly visible fall from grace. The Queen’s charge d’affairs contacted Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, to complain that seeing the bad boy governor farting the Star Spangled Banner on the Ipod screen had caused the grand lady to spew hot tea all over her royal trappings.
Obama Re-Gifts Queen Elizabeth
