If the President really, truly wants to go somewhere the Secret Service will suck it up and do what they need to. The question is how often have you ever seen that happen? Especially into someone’s house? It hasn’t happened and it won’t happen.
Yeah, I’d shut down for a week for the chance to get a picture of President Obama shaking my hand.
Yes but in this case he didn’t visit the factory. He was just in the area. Maybe it was a factory that produced explosive chemicals or something.
I’m not sure about precedents with the President (see what I did there?), but VP Biden was turned away in this very manner by a bakery owner in Virginia. One cite:
In the movie The Right Stuff there’s a scene where the VP wants to come in to one of the astronauts homes and interview the wife. The wife wants nothing to do with it and refuses. LBJ (VP at the time) throws a fit and they make the astronaut call his wife and tell her to let the VP in. He calls his wife and tells her it’s her call. LBJ doesn’t get in. So yeah, you can tell the POTUS to go pound sand.
Even a deceased ex-president can shut down a freeway, creating a rolling demilitarized zone while his deceased ex-presidential hearse rolls through, as happened on a stretch of US-101 during Ronald Reagan’s week-long royal funeral.
President Kennedy was famous (or infamous from the Secret Service point of view) for running off into crowds, and choosing to get driven around in a convertible with the top down. (And look what that choice got him.)
Famous pics of Kennedy at the beach, and convertible with top down.
Since you didn’t name the astronaut (or his wife), I’m guessing you’re not clear on the actual details. The astronaut in question was John Glenn. His wife, Annie (Castor) Glenn, was a life-long stutterer and had been horribly, phobically publicity shy because of it. I’m pretty sure the relevant scenes (there were several of them in the movie) were highly exaggerated. That particular movie didn’t let the actual facts get in the way of a good story.
Mrs. Glenn later completed some intensive speech training program and was able to overcome her publicity-shyness, and did some public speaking.
You’re citing Hollywood.
Well there was that incident where Michelle Obama was in a store and a customer thought she was a worker and asked her for some help getting a box off a high shelf.
And I think its happened a few times when a president decides to walk into say a bar and some people suddenly find themselves in the spotlight.
In the early telling of the story, she was asked to help because she’s tall.