The First Lady of Virginia, according to the
Washington Post:
She asked Williams to pick up the tab for a $15,000 shopping trip to Bergdorf Goodman in New York, people with knowledge of the gift have said. And after admiring Williams’s Rolex watch, she
asked him to buy one so that she could give it to her husband, Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R). She received a $50,000 check from Williams, which the governor reported as a loan, as she confided financial stress to friends.
Some of Maureen McDonnell’s closest friends are surprised by the reports, saying the first lady is as sweet as her public image. But some people she has worked with at the governor’s mansion and in state government paint a different portrait: One of someone unable to make the leap into the Richmond fishbowl.
They say she can be hard on staff, so much so that after several resignations, a team from Virginia Commonwealth University was summoned to the mansion to provide intensive workplace counseling.
Of course she hasn't done anything as bad as Bill Clinton, in the memorable words of
Margaret Noonan:
Throughout the yearlong trauma he forced the country through, he smirked and maneuvered and muscled people. He acted as if he were still in Little Rock, still up against legislators in plaid suits who own the Chevy dealership. When Bill Clinton was governor and it was the Yalie vs. the yokels, the yokels folded when you leaned on them. But Washington is not Little Rock. This is why David Broder told Sally Quinn, "He trashed the place, and it wasn't his place to trash." And Lindsey Graham and Chris Cox and Bill McCollum are not yokels.
Christianist sanctimony, contempt for working people, and shameless grifting do not constitute what Noonan, Quinn, and the late Dean regarded as "trashing the place".
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