Monday, November 19, 2007

President Bush will kick off Thanksgiving week festivities by traveling today to what is billed as "Virginia's most historic plantation," the Berkeley Plantation in Charles City, the site of the first Thanksgiving celebration on record.

The presidential visit is sure to be a boon to the plantation, whose primacy in the annals of Thanksgiving history is a somewhat touchy subject.

As former Virginia governor Gerald Baliles wrote earlier this month in an opinion piece in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, historians acknowledge that the first Thanksgiving celebration of record indeed took place at Berkeley on Dec. 4, 1619 -- "precisely one year and 17 days before the Pilgrims landed in New England, and 12 years after Jamestown's founding," Baliles noted. Nevertheless, it is the Pilgrims with their symbolic Plymouth Rock who often get top historical billing.

This piece of Virginia history was once overlooked, Baliles recalled, by a previous occupant of the White House. John Kennedy was taken to task in 1962 by Virginia state Sen. John J. Wicker for neglecting Virginia in his previous year's Presidential Thanksgiving Proclamation. Wicker's complaint made it to the desk of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who wrote to Wicker on behalf of the president, attributing the "error" to "unconquerable New England bias on the part of the White House staff."

President Bush, despite his born-in-Connecticut heritage, clearly has no such bias and is set to visit the plantation's "Thanksgiving Shrine" and give an address about the holiday today. On the way down, Bush is scheduled to stop at the Central Virginia Food Bank in Richmond.

When Turkeys Fly: The real presidential celebration of Thanksgiving will not come, though, until tomorrow, when Bush will pardon the National Thanksgiving Turkey, and a spare.

It is the 60th year of this theater of poultry mercy, but it marks the first time the turkeys will get to celebrate their newfound liberty with Mickey Mouse. They will be flown first class on United Airlines to Orlando for a parade at Walt Disney World before they settle in behind Mickey's Country House.

The birds may owe Bush for more than just the pardon: Their flight to Florida will be along a route included on the "Thanksgiving Express Lanes," carved (ahem) just last week from military airspace by the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Defense to expedite holiday travel.

Stick to the Issues: The Federal Election Commission is scheduled to meet Tuesday to review proposed changes to its "electioneering communications" rule. Its decision could impact advertising in the early-voting states in next year's presidential primaries.

The change was prompted by a Supreme Court ruling in June that threw out a prohibition in the McCain-Feingold campaign finance act against specific mention of a candidate in the days before an election by ads financed by corporations or unions.

The court found that the prohibition unconstitutionally limited such groups' freedom of speech, then essentially left it to the FEC to rule on what an ad bought by unions or corporations can say before it becomes a clear message for or against a candidate.

The answer, according to one draft of the rules posted online last week, is that acceptable ads could urge a candidate to take a position on a public policy issue or encourage the public to contact a candidate about a specific issue.

By Rachel Dry