Because this year's presidential inauguration happens to fall on a federal holiday -- Martin Luther King Jr. Day -- Washington, D.C.-based federal employees this time around will not find the "extra paid holiday" that they enjoyed four years ago. Reporting this development, Washington Post writer Josh Hicks lamented in a January 7 The Fed Page article that [emphasis mine] "the historic event... will cost the region's government employees a quadrennial holiday, at least in terms of pay and leave."
That sound you're hearing now is the world's smallest violin. At no point in Hicks's 16-paragraph story did he see the occasion as a win, however slight, for American taxpayers: one day's pay for thousands of federal workers is a drop in the ocean of red ink in which the U.S. government swims, but hey, we'll take what we can get.
The usual quadrennial inauguration holiday "applies only to federal workers in the D.C. area instead of nationwide," Hicks explained, purely because of "logistical problems -- such as traffic congestion and security -- associated with the event."
Hicks devoted the last four paragraphs of his story to giving the liberal NAACP a platform to insist that President Obama is the fulfillment of Martin Luther King Junior's dream:
Perhaps more notable is the symbolic importance of President Obama taking the oath of office on the King holiday.
“It works so well together,” said Hilary Shelton, senior vice president of policy and advocacy for the NAACP and director of the organization’s D.C. bureau. “It’s a wonderful thing, because so many people that support Dr. King’s legacy and believe in his dream will be coming to this inauguration.”
Shelton said Obama’s efforts on job creation, hate-crime prevention, public education and access to health care align with the mission of the late civil rights leader, who was assassinated in 1968.
“Many people see the agenda President Obama has worked so hard to push forward as something that supports Dr. King’s vision,” he said. “If we look at the agenda put forward by this administration, we see a direct correlation with what Dr. King worked for and died for.”
