Off to Washington Rejoicing

It’s been more easily said than done, but the Prime Minister of Spain Mariano Rajoy, has been received by the President of the United States Barack Obama, in the White House’s Oval Office. We can count on the triumphant catastrophists to point out that our prime minister’s visit emerges more than two years after his electoral victory by a commanding majority. They will establish unfavorable comparisons with other European colleagues and they will bring up that, for example, the Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti was received in the White House barely two weeks after being installed in the Quirinale, without having won any election.

But they are eager to detract because, depending how the counting is done, yesterday’s conversation could be considered the fifth held by the two leaders. We shall see. The last was in Johannesburg, this past Dec. 10 during Nelson Mandela’s funeral; the one prior to it on Sept. 6 in St. Petersburg, for nearly 40 seconds with the American in a narrow corridor at the G-20 meetings. The first two correspondences happened in 2012 — one at the NATO summit in Chicago in May and the other at the Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul in March.

Additionally, the forgetful who are prone to grumbling their resentments all over creation should be reminded that President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, during the eight years in which he resided in La Moncloa, barely met with Obama at that national prayer breakfast in March 2010, reading a passage from Deuteronomy which says, “You must not exploit a poor and needy wage-earner, be he one of your brothers or a foreigner resident in your community. You must pay him his wages each day … since he, being poor, needs them badly …” There he had a personal moment, accompanied by the cream of the media and business elite, who at that time knew nothing of his situation, typical of the Spanish brand.

What better preparation for yesterday’s meeting with President Obama than Friday’s sit-down at the Toledo Parador, where Rajoy met with the top intellectuals in the international sphere; namely the secretary general of the Popular Party, María Dolores de Cospedal; the Vice Secretaries Carlos Floriano, Javier Arenas and Esteban González Pons; the congressional Speakers Alfonso Alonso in the Senate, José Manuel Barreiro, in the European Parliament; and Jaime Mayor Oreja. All this was topped off with the presence of Palace Adviser Pedro Arriola, who is the supplier of mood stabilizers in the form of victorious polls in coming elections.

In any case, we know offerings—not demands—are carried to the Oval Office. The supreme leader cannot be importuned with problems. As Canetti defined it, “The joy of the weakest is to give something to the strongest.”* Let us sing: I rejoiced when they said to me, “Let us go to the house of the Lord.”

*Editor’s note: This quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.