For the West Wing’s 100th anniversary, the White House web site features room tours in
streaming video. They’re surprisingly bad in terms of camerawork and encoding (inexplicably, the clips have a lot of black space around them.)

Production values aside, it’s interesting to see how each player handles it. George Bush, the only host to rate a title screen and a second language option, refuses to make eye contact with the camera and offers up gems such as “The windas are magnificent, uh, they let in the sunlight” and the ever-controversial “My family is a priority in my life.” He chose to decorate the room with busts of Churchill (right), Lincoln (gotcha), and Eisenhower (huh?). And of course one can’t have enough bad Texas art.

Laura Bush, who’s probably responsible for some of it, stays firmly planted in one spot of the Diplomatic room, and she suffers an unfortunate editing slight when the editors add artificial pauses to her description of wallcoverings.

Dick Cheney stows the smirk for a bit to show his ceremonial office. He has a few interesting things to say about the role of a vice-president and does some cool show-and-tell when he opens up a miraculously clean desk drawer and reveals that all the vice-presidents who used the desk signed their names in it. (I’m going to assume it was just a coincidence he used the middle finger to point out Al Gore‘s signature.)

Lynne Cheney opens next to a huge fucking cow-dog. Surprisingly, she rates by far the most time with over 14 minutes. Unfortunately, other than the huge fucking cow-dog, I can’t tell you much because I couldn’t bear to listen to her for much longer than a minute.

The other people aren’t very memorable, but it’s interesting to see the rooms and wonder what the next occupants will do with the place in 2004.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 13th, 2002 at 11:55 pm and is filed under Miscellany.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.