Seen leaving for Maine this morning, the President’s weekend
reading material made some reporters feel like they were eating pretzels. I wonder if this obvious “product placement” will have the same results as when Reagan called the then-obscure Hunt for Red October “non-put-downable” sending it to Number 1 on the NY Times best seller list. The strangest Presidential product placement story I can recall was reported in American Heritage magazine several years ago. John Kennedy, in order to help out a hat-maker who had been a sailor on PT-109, agreed to wear one of his hats for a few days. (I can’t find any reference to confirm my memory of this story, but I did find a picture of Kennedy holding the hat, the picture that appeared with the AH story.)

With the 107th Congress kicking off its second session this week and President Bush finalizing next week’s State of the Union address, our client, the powerful small business advocacy organization NFIB, yesterday unveiled its annual legislative agenda.

Don’t read this as a sports story. It describes how champion jockey Tony McCoy refused to give up after being thrown by his horse as it jumped a fence midway through a race yesterday. After falling, he hitched a ride from a course vehicle, remounted his horse at the finishing line, went back to where he fell, and proceeded to win the race. How? Well, that’s where this stops being a sports story and becomes an allegory fitting to the horse’s name, Family Business.