WASHINGTON: Four days of official inauguration activities begin Saturday as President-elect Barack Obama and Vice President-elect Joseph Biden embark on their train ride from to the nation's capital.
Obama's January 17 train trip from Philadelphia to Washington is intended to make the inauguration the most open and accessible in history, but it is also presenting the US Secret Service with security problems: miles and miles and miles of them.
In addition to the well-publicized "whistle stops" in Philadelphia; Wilmington, Delaware; and Baltimore, Maryland, the Presidential Inauguration Committee says the public will have the opportunity to view the train along its 137-mile route.
As the president-elect and his vice president approach Washington, dozens of Republicans are fleeing Washington this weekend to get away from the crowds, the cold and Barack Obama souvenirs. While many Democrats are approaching the inauguration of Obama as the 44th president with unbridled excitement, Republican spirits are considerably muted as they brace for a couple of million Democratic partygoers invading the city, not to mention the loss of thousands of Republican jobs.
The switch from a Republican to a Democratic White House will put at least 8,000 Republicans out of work. The loss of Republican seats in the House and the Senate has added to the Republican employment problem. And the consultants and lobbyists who do business based on their relationships with Republican lawmakers and administration officials are expecting to feel the pinch, too. Meanwhile, for those attending the inaugural balls Tuesday, they may be feeling a different type of pinch.
This year the big-ticket event on every Democrat celebrity's list is Barack Obama's Presidential Inauguration. Word has it those attending the balls are taking getting decked out for the occasion very seriously. In 2006, First Lady Laura Bush wore the same Oscar de la Renta gown as four other women. In fashion, that's a catastrophe. But this year, in order to avoid the same fate, socialites, politicians and celebs alike, are signing up at dressregistry.com.
The site logs who's wearing what so that women won't - horror of horrors - show up in the same dress as someone else.
Predictably, most of this town is abuzz over what gown Michelle Obama will wear.
Obama, 44, already named a fashion icon by magazine editors, fashion designers and a flurry of bloggers, took fashion's center stage when she was photographed by Vogue magazine in autumn 2007. Standing at 6 feet tall, she is both slender and shapely.
Fashion experts believe Obama will wear a dress by an American designer, and that she should wear something more subdued in recognition of the hard economic times.
"I'm sure she won't have an over-the-top gown studded with diamonds and rubies," said etiquette expert Letitia Baldrige, former social secretary to first lady Jackie Kennedy. "It will be something suitably quiet for the times."
Bruce Buchanan, a history professor from the University of Texas at Austin, cited "the extent to which the first lady through her choice of apparel conveys what the administration would regard as the right message about her ambitions, her taste, her sense of stature, her aura of elegance."
"The first lady is a balancing act between being a queen and a commoner," said Carl Sferrazza Anthony, who has written extensively about first ladies. "The inaugural gown is a metaphor for the first lady role."
