Rental accommodation

Barack Obama and family are in France to spend a ‘discreet’ holiday over near Avignon. They have rented a large 18c property for the occasion and are paying a mere 55000€ per week for the privilege.
Add to that the transport fees for the family and umpteen bodyguards and the cost of policing their stay in France.
I don’t have a problem with Obama coming, good luck to him but I do object to having to pay for his protection whilst in France.
Am I being a mean old so and so ?

Maybe Peter ! :wink: I like him, and Michelle even more so - I don’t mind a couple of euros of my taxes going towards his stay here. Good for tourism to PACA and France in general.

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The Obama’s being who they are it wouldn’t surprise me if they organised for the US to reimburse the french police costs… other Potus’s probably wouldn’t.

Each to their own but Obama was a big let down whilst in office and has ‘sold out’ since he quit politics.

Yes, he was a major disappointment when in office just when he had the chance to really change things.

Place Obama against a trumpian calibrated measuring stick and was he really that dreadful?

Well he promised so much and didn’t deliver, especially on healthcare and the race card. So much was expected maybe too much, from people all over the world.
Comparing him and any other President to Trump isn’t really fair because the present man in the Oval Office is such a disaster.

The expectations for the Obama presidency was much higher than for Trump’s and many people were disappointed that after eight years nothing really had changed. BO is now a multi-millionaire after cashing-in on the celebrity of being a former POTUS.

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I think, Peter, you overlook the deeply entrenched opposition he faced in the Senate over his healthcare and other reforms, the product of a historic legacy of implacable racism in the Southern states, and elsewhere.

But his presidency has woken non-white Americans to the possibility, indeed the inevitability, of change. And of its irreversibility. Some people are capable of taking the long view, and the Obamas are an example, like Martin Luther King, of the future of America, and of mankind.

If the likes of Trump, Bolton, Pompeo and their nefariously white supremacist counterparts in Europe don’t open the Gates of Hell for all of us in the very near future.

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Every regime will have opposition, that’s the democracy working. fact remains Obama didn’t take advantage of his position to change things. Comparing him to M L King and Rosa Parks etc is pretty futile. He failed during his years in office.
Don’t compare him to Trump, they’re chalk and cheese tho’ it would be funny if Donald manages to acheive more tha Obama during his probable two terms in office !