Nancy Reagan, radiant in a red pantsuit, rested her hand on President Barack Obama’s shoulder as he signed a bill to honor her late husband and icon of the right Ronald Reagan.

Obama, as is usual, signed with his left hand.

“Oh, you’re a lefty,” Reagan said, to scattered chuckles in the room.

“I am a lefty,” Obama replied evenly, adding: “Well, I think that President Reagan’s signature was more legible than mine.”

The bill creates a panel to plan and carry out events to honor Reagan’s 100th birthday in 2011. He died in 2004.

Obama slowly escorted the 87-year-old Reagan into the White House Diplomatic Room for the ceremony, as she clutched onto his arm and walked with a cane.

His remarks were almost Reaganesque.

“President Reagan helped as much as any president to restore a sense of optimism in our country, a spirit that transcended politics — that transcended even the most heated arguments of the day,” Obama said.

But Obama also praised Nancy Reagan for helping to draw attention to Alzheimer’s disease, which afflicted her husband before his death.

“In saying a long goodbye, Nancy Reagan became a voice on behalf of millions of families experiencing the depleting, aching reality of Alzheimer’s disease,” Obama said.

Nancy Reagan recently told Vanity Fair magazine she was a little miffed to miss an earlier White House event on stem cell research, one of her causes.

For more Reuters political news, click here.

Photo credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque (President Obama clasps former first lady Nancy Reagan’s hand after he signed Ronald Reagan tribute bill)

Barack Obama went to a gym at a military base in Hawaii the other day and did something positively Reaganesque — he returned a Marine’s salute.
 
In so doing, he wandered directly into the middle of a thorny debate: Should U.S. presidents return military salutes or not?
 
Longstanding tradition requires members of the military to salute the president. The practice of presidents returning that salute is more recent — Ronald Reagan started it in 1981.
 
Reagan’s decision raised eyebrows at the time. Dwight Eisenhower, a former five-star general, did not return military salutes while president. Nor had other presidents.
 
John Kline, then Reagan’s military aide and now a Minnesota congressman, advised him that it went against military protocol for presidents to return salutes.
 
Kline said in a 2004 op-ed piece in The Hill that Reagan ultimately took up the issue with Gen. Robert Barrow, then commandant of the Marine Corps.
 
Barrow told Reagan that as commander in chief of the armed forces, he was entitled to offer a salute — or any sign of respect he wished — to anyone he wished, Kline wrote, adding he was glad for the change.
 
Every president since Reagan has followed that practice, even those with no military experience. President Bill Clinton’s saluting skills were roundly criticized after he took office, but the consensus was he eventually got better.
 
The debate over saluting has persisted, with some arguing against it for protocol reasons, others saying it represents an increasing militarization of the civilian presidency.
 
“The gesture is of course quite wrong: Such a salute has always required the wearing of a uniform,” author and historian John Lukacs wrote in The New York Times in 2003.
 
“But there is more to this than a decline in military manners,” he added. “There is something puerile in the Reagan (and now Bush) salute. It is the joyful gesture of someone who likes playing soldier. It also represents an exaggeration of the president’s military role.”
 
Garry Wills, the author and Northwestern University professor, echoed those remarks in the Times in 2007.
 
“The glorification of the president as a war leader is registered in numerous and substantial executive aggrandizements; but it is symbolized in other ways that, while small in themselves, dispose the citizenry to accept those aggrandizements,” he wrote.
 
“We are reminded, for instance, of the expanded commander in chief status every time a modern president gets off the White House helicopter and returns the salute of Marines.”
 
What do you think? Is returning a salute a common courtesy? Or should Obama reconsider the practice?
 
For more Reuters political news, click here.

Photo credit: Reuters/Hugh Gentry (Obama waves after leaving a gym at a Marine Corps base in Hawaii Dec. 23); Reuters/Pool (Bush salutes at a ceremony in New York Nov. 11)

WASHINGTON - Republican presidential hopeful John McCain, who often invokes former President Ronald Reagan, had an almost Reaganesque moment this week — a hostage rescue.
 
Hours after McCain left Colombia, where he had spent the day pushing free trade, that country’s president Alvaro Uribe revealed the military had freed several hostages, including three Americans, long held captive by the militant group FARC.
 
Just minutes after Reagan took office in 1981, coincidentally, the American hostages in Iran were released.
 
Sadly for those conspiracy theorists wondering whether McCain had a role in the Colombia rescue or was tipped off about it before he arrived in the country, signs suggest otherwise.
 
McCain said in a statement that he had been briefed by Uribe the day before the operation and that the two later spoke about it.
 
“He told me some of the details of the dramatic rescue of the people who were held hostage,” McCain said.
 
While the United States helped with some aspects of the operation, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino denied any suggestion that McCain was advised by his fellow Republicans in the Bush administration.
 
“I think this was long in the planning stages,” she told reporters. I’ve heard nothing to suggest that there was any connection,” she told reporters. “I just think it was coincidence.”

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.  

Photo credit: Reuters/Jose Gomez (McCain and Uribe at news conference July 1)