Gardiner Harris, the paper’s White House correspondent, assumed duty as the pool reporter on Sunday—which means he’s following President Barack Obama around the Hawaiian island of Oahu. And he’s rubbing it in a little.
The sun is out, and the sky is Dodger blue. The light has turned the ocean shallows into a cyan blue — the kind of inviting tropical color that your pool rarely experiences in anything but the furthest southern reaches of the Florida Keys. But beyond the break, the ocean snarls into a sapphire blue — the kind of dark, forbidding color that speaks of great depth and sharp teeth. Your pooler swam into those depths early this morning under a nearly full moon...
The motorcade later cut through the Ko’olau mountain range.
As the motorcade topped the spine of the last mountain, a brilliant sunset broke through the fog and cast the surrounding ridges into stark relief. Your pool descended upon Honolulu as a golden-hued chariot with a souped-up police escort.
Your pooler has become entranced by this island’s extraordinary beauty. Next to DC, Oahu is an SI swimsuit model with a PhD in astrophysics and a stint behind her at the Cordon Bleu....
Your pool needs a bureau here.
Don’t be jealous. As Politico notes, “being assigned to the White House press corps is increasingly seen by journalists as a high-status job with limited opportunity for actual reporting.” So you can hardly blame Harris—who recently had to leave his post in pollution-choked New Delhi to save his asthmatic son—for waxing poetic when he has the chance. And it’s not his fault you chose to spend the holidays in Plattsburgh.