Today President Obama is having lunch with Mitt Romney, fulfilling the this-was-just-a-figure-of-speech-do we-really?-oh-man-now-this-is-awkward promise on election night that he was "looking forward to sitting down with Governor Romney to talk about where we can work together to move this country forward." Surely the president, who has spent his time since the election grappling with an embarrassing scandal plaguing his CIA director and top general in Afghanistan, brokering a fragile peace agreement to an extremely volatile and deadly conflict in the Middle East, and fighting a budget impasse to prevent the collapse of the American economy, has much to learn from a guy who has filled his days watching a dry-humping flick for teenagers and telling everyone he lost because people are addicted to social welfare.
A week after the election, at his first press conference in months, the president again insisted that there was something he could learn from Romney. Obama told reporters:
I do think he did a terrific job running the Olympics. And you know, that skill set of trying to figure out how do we make something work better applies to the federal government. There are a lot of ideas that I don’t think are partisan ideas but are just smart ideas about how can we make the federal government more customer-friendly.
Indeed, Obama made similar remarks about Vice President McCain, who, as we all know, became a major part of the president's commitment to leading a bipartisan coalition of people with "smart ideas," first when he built McCain his own living quarters on Pennsylvania Avenue "so my Maverick can be by my side when I need him" and later when he asked the Arizona Senator to be his new running mate during a Friars Club Roast.
The luncheon will be closed to press, but presumably Governor Romney and the president will be sharing a single plate of spaghetti on a table set up in the Rose Garden. Sources close to the White House also tell Gothamist that Joe Biden has been brushing up on his accordion.
