Inaugural party cost draws wrath
Sunday, January 16, 2005 12:34 AM PST
By Washington Post
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E-mail this articleWASHINGTON -- A peace activist who thinks the money lavished on inaugural balls would be better spent on body armor for troops in Iraq plans to attend the parade and turn his back to protest.
A grandmother of four sent the White House a tongue-in-cheek invitation to hold the inauguration at her house under rented tents, proposing to free up millions of dollars to feed and house the poor.
A white-collar Republican who voted for President Bush tried to organize an e-mail campaign expressing disdain at the waste of a party for "fat cats."
As troops fight in Iraq and relief workers scurry to aid tsunami survivors in Asia, some Americans believe the inaugural festivities for Bush's second term are an unseemly show of extravagance.
On the other hand, people active in charitable giving said the festivities will have no effect on donations; reservists and National Guard members said they are eager to see the president looking so presidential; and local members of Congress said they had received few to no calls from constituents upset about the inauguration expense.
Overt anti-inauguration sentiment is rare. "I think it's because we're in a post-9/11 period, in a time of war," said Jim Bendat, who wrote "Democracy's Big Day," a historical book on inaugurations. "And we just had this terrible tsunami. There's just a lot going on right now, causing some people to wonder if it's worth spending all this money on a party for someone who had one just four years ago."
Internet blog sites -- many with contributors who are antagonistic toward the Bush administration -- are filled with discussions about the human suffering that could be alleviated with the $35 million to $40 million being spent on the inauguration. Among them was the blog run by Dallas billionaire Mark Cuban, who proposed scrapping the parties and donating the money to tsunami victims. Several sites draw unflattering contrasts between Bush and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who for his 1945 inauguration eschewed a parade and had a few people over for a buffet of chicken salad and pound cake.
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