Obama gets first look at Oval Office

WASHINGTON—Barack Obama visited President George W. Bush at the White House today, and hopefully their sit-down will be considerably less bizarre than their first meeting four years ago.
In his book “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama wrote about how Bush reached for a bottle of anti-bacterial hand sanitizer after they greeted one another at a White House breakfast for new senators following the 2004 election.

After warmly shaking his hand, Obama recalled, Bush then “turned to an aide nearby, who squirted a big dollop of hand sanitizer in the president’s hand.”
“Good stuff,” Obama quoted the president as saying, as he offered his guest some. “Keeps you from getting colds.”
Not wanting to seem unhygienic, Obama recalled, “I took a squirt.”
It was unclear whether a thorough hand-sanitizing would be on the agenda today at the White House when Barack and Michelle Obama visit with George W. and Laura Bush, but one thing was for certain: after a customary tour of the official presidential residence, the two men were expected to begin the transition of power with a long and substantive talk about the issues of the day.
Michelle Obama and Laura Bush were slated to break away from their husbands to discuss the residence, and likely the challenges of raising children within its celebrated walls.
The Bush twins, Jenna and Barbara, were 18 when Bush arrived at the White House in 2000.
Malia Obama is 10 and her sister, Sasha, is seven, and they’ll be the youngest children to live there since nine-year-old Amy Carter moved in after Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976.
There was every reason to assume a meeting between Bush and the president-elect might be uncomfortable—Obama has spent much of the last two years, after all, assailing just about every facet of Bush’s presidency.
Bush, for his part, apparently said privately that Hillary Clinton would have been a better presidential nominee for the Democratic party due to her wealth of political experience.
And Obama didn’t stop at the hand-sanitizing incident in “The Audacity of Hope”—he also wrote negatively about Bush’s demeanour during the meeting.
“The president’s eyes became fixed; his voice took on the agitated, rapid tone of someone neither accustomed to nor welcoming interruption; his easy affability was replaced by an almost messianic certainty,” Obama wrote.
“As I watched my mostly Republican Senate colleagues hang on his every word, I was reminded of the dangerous isolation that power can bring.”
The president-elect also is reportedly compiling a list of Bush policies he likely will reverse immediately upon taking office, including a ban on stem-cell research funding.
Nonetheless, Bush made what was described as a heartfelt and genuinely enthusiastic call to Obama on election night, congratulating him and his “good bride,” and Obama has said the president has been generous and co-operative about sharing information with his team in advance of the transition.
Democrats also have praised Bush for his post-election remarks in the Rose Garden, when he said it would be a “stirring sight” to watch the Obamas move into the White House.
“I’m not going to anticipate problems,” Obama said Friday at his first news conference as president-elect. “I’m going to go in there with a spirit of bipartisanship.”