AIUI, the White House is a fantastic place to live in terms of service - you have Secret Service and some of the finest chefs/staff in the world - but its accommodations are actually rather lousy (by standards of the rich, not us common peons.) It has all sorts of stuffy couches, drapes, chandeliers and 1800s stuff but couldn’t hold a candle to Bill Gates’ riverside mansion in Washington State, for instance. Probably nowhere as good as Obama’s $44 million Martha’s Vineyard estate. Very old fashioned and dim.
Nitpick. If you’re talking about Gates’ primary home, it’s on Lake Washington and not a river. (He very well might own another home on a river somewhere, but I haven’t seen it mentioned.)
As for the White House, it seems perfectly fine, but nothing amazing about the living quarters (as far as I can tell from watching House of Cards)
Just joking. When Trump came in they did a bit of renovation but it was mostly cosmetic. The big thing they did was replace the heat/AC which was almost 30 years old.
The main thing that sets it apart from modern mansions is it’s not modern in design. Millionaires, billionaires and even those with enough money for a McMansion are used to big rooms and open floor plans. Go into any Georgian mansion and the rooms will feel small to modern sensibilities. They can keep it fancy but they haven’t made it bigger.
One reason Trump flies to Mar-a-Lago almost every week is that he hates how deficient the White House is compared to what he’s used to. He hates Camp David even more, akin to going camping.
It’s a perpetual problem with government facilities. We want them to be modern and technologically up-to-date but resent spending a dime of taxpayer money to do so. That’s why states’ unemployment systems failed so miserably, why the rollout of Obamacare failed, why the stimulus money didn’t get to those in need, why the IRS can’t collect overdue taxes, and an additional list of examples that would bust through the 20,000 character limit of a post.
All governmental bodies in this country are seriously, dangerously, hopelessly underfunded from top to bottom. It’s yet another multi-trillion dollar crisis that’s about to crash down on us that nobody is paying a bit of attention to.
It was totally falling apart. The gutted it except for the exterior walls and started over. The floor plan is completely different than it was* so it’s still the same size as before.
*Which is why the stories of seeing Lincoln’s ghost in the bedroom where he used to sleep are silly.
For a long time when they had big dinners the food was almost always French. The chefs were experts in French dishes. That’s no longer the case now , not sure when it changed.
So if the Pres orders a cheeseburger brought to his room at 9 o’clock at night, does he order it like room service in a hotel? That’ll be $12.50 , and no tipping.
Yes, he is charged for the cheeseburger. But there is no service charge for delivering it to his room, so it costs the same as it would if he had it as a regular meal.
Basically, the president pays for the groceries which are used in preparing private meals for himself and his family and friends, and taxpayers pay for groceries used for meals served on official occasions. The kitchen and serving staff are fully paid for by the taxpayer. If the President wants to send out for a McDonald’s cheesburger, a publicly-paid staff member will go out and get it, but the cost of the burger itself is added to the President’s tab (which I believe he settles monthly).
Why are we specifically comparing the White House to the Obama “estate” rather than, say, any of the current President’s multiple properties and residences?
This is about what I would have guessed before looking it up – Clinton was the first baby-boomer president after seven consecutive presidents born between 1908 and 1924. For my grandparents, who were in the same birth cohort, Fancy Food was French. They did eat other ethnic cuisines sometimes, like Chinese or Italian, and Christmas at my maternal grandparents’ house was all about the Polish home cooking, but going out for a really special occasion meant going to a French restaurant.
Per the same (long, but interesting) article, the Reagans were apparently more adventurous eaters than the rest of the Greatest Generation presidents, introducing things like pita bread to White House state dinners.
