They call it “optics.”
The White House has a team of people – you taxpayers foot the bill, of course – that spends its days thinking of the best way to portray the president in the most favorable light.
(“Maybe we should snap him riding a bike in Hawaii?” “Let’s snap him playing hoops!” “His 122nd round of golf? No cameras please.”)
But sometimes, they snooze. Like last week, when The Team let the president step out – for the cameras – at the Door of No Return.
Now, President George W. Bush stood at the very same spot in 2003, but at a different place entirely – stunning party pickups in the 2002 midterms, majority in the House and Senate, headed to re- election, on the top of the world. It was a picture, nothing more.
Thursday, though, was some very bad “optics.” President Obama, standing alone, morose, looking down, sullen, mock contemplative, within the Door of No Return. Below him, rust-stained cinder blocks, craggy rocks of a shallow port, the Atlantic Ocean.
At another time, meaningless. But at this precise moment, a few frames that encapsulate the president, now, and his plight in millions of ways – far beyond the few million megapixels.
First, the scene wasn’t what it seemed. While the Huffington Post called it “very powerful moment” – the president standing at a doorway in Senegal from which Africans were said to have been shipped across the ocean into American slavery – it was not that at all.
He was, in fact, standing at a garbage chute.
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