The Emperial Presidency Is A Bummer

The President is First Among Equals: Bullshit!

One of my in laws is a fire captain in California, and works for the State Forestry Department. He and his crew have been fighting fire 24 hours on 24 hours off for over a week.
This is an recent update from his wife where she mentions the recent Presidential visit.

"XXXXX and his crews were fighting fire side by side with a XXXXX City FD crew. Imagine how different this experience was for them! XXXXX did not see the President and Governor when they visited on Thursday. However, it was the fire camp/incident command center for XXXXX's fire that the politicos visited. What did that mean to the crews? It meant that their strike team leader was NOT allowed into the fire camp to get supplies* for his crews while the president was visiting!"

*Supplies: air, water, food, first aid materials, replacement tools, etc.

I was living in Washington D.C. during the Johnson administration. I saw Lyndon a half dozen times (once he was with the Shaw of Iran) and he was never accompanied by draconian security measures. In fact one lunch hour My friends and I spent a half hour or so asking questions of VP Humphrey on the steps of a Student Center he was visiting. Mind you we were just walking by and stopped and got into the conversation.

This of course was just a year or two after the assassination of Kennedy.
I even saw Nixon when he visited in Arlington Cemetery in about 1969, to place a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He arrived in a two car "convoy".

My best guess is that all this changed about the time after the Regan shooting.

Soon there afterward the President became an untouchable ghostly public presence and a pain the ass to the general public.

I tried to see President Regan when he came to Oklahoma City once. At that time I worked in the State Capitol building. I was not allowed to go to work while he was in the building. He came in a motorcade, in cars with mirrored windows which you could not see through, and drove into the Capitol building underground where he could not be seen. All the roads and streets to and from the airport were closed down along his route for the duration of his stay.
It was then I began to suspect that Regan was either dead or using a stand-in or double.

The next time I ran into the imperial tendencies, was in a hotel next to the Boston airport. The VP, Al Gore apparently had landed at the airport and was unloading at the south end close by the hotel. His route into town went right in front of my window. So of course I opened my curtains and got my camera. No, No, NO! With a few minutes a knock on my door brought some kind of rent-a-cop security person accompanied by a suit. Close your curtains and stand away from that side of the hotel. Actually he had passed by several minutes before but nobody knew that.

Then the one that really pissed me off was when the Union Pacific Railroad was closing down their Tennessee Pass route across the Rockies and were going to run one their steam locomotives and a special train over the route. I called for tickets 5 minutes after midnight the day they were supposed to be on sale. Sold Out! What, they were all pre-sold all 800 of them. The White House had bought them all to give the finance ministers from around the world a ride on the train while they were in Denver for a meeting.

Then they added injury to insult. Several weeks later were driving West along I-70 going to the foothills of Denver to visit some of my in laws. All of a sudden all traffic was diverted off of I-70 without warning to a South bound road which was already clogged with cars. As we turned South we could see a multi-car convoy of black SVUs turning onto the empty lanes of I-70 from the Denver airport. It was President Clinton going to that same damn finance summit.

It took us 3 and 1/2 hours of bumper to bumper unfriendly traffic with the ssun shinning into our face to drive completely around Denver to get to a destination that should have taken 15 minutes. My bladder is not rated for more that 2 and 1/2 hours at a time.

The Presidential tendency to be a pain in the ass to the general publics' comings and goings has escalated potentially just in my adult lifetime. What's next?