Churchill has been banished from the White House. Along with 13 year old fathers, the British press was aflutter about this. Bush the Younger had a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office, but President Obama prefers a bust of Lincoln apparently.
The British Diplomatic establishment is busy parsing this move for any weird signals that it might send about the future of the Special Relationship. One suggestion is a bust of 19th Century MP Jacob Bright who was an ardent supporter of the Union forces during the Civil War. (Britain and France preferring to surreptitiously aid the Confederacy in the name of instability on the North American continent.) My vote would be for a bust of William Wilberforce, the British abolitionist that helped to abolish slavery in the British Empire.
More votes? I think Pitt the Younger would be a good choice- he didn't have much interaction with the Americans that I can remember- but he didn't fit comfortably into the partisan system in Britain at the time. And having achieved power at the age of 24, he was certainly groundbreaking. His tenure might be just a little too historically close to the Revolution to be a comfortable choice though.
The official reason for the banishment of Churchill-- it was only on loan through January of 2009. The speculation? Churchill was responsible for surpressing the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya- one of the people caught up in that mess? None other than the President's own Grandfather.
President Obama appears to have a fairly cogent sense of his own family history. It'll be interesting to see how that might come into play when (and I am assuming he's going to) he visits Kenya.
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