As Barack Obama came in, my two-year-old daughter threw herself on the floor". Claudier Moser became an internet sensation last year after a photo of her throwing a tantrum at the White House went viral.
Official White House photographer Pete Souza captured the photo of the two-year-old daughter of White House correspondent Laura Moser, with her face down on the floor. "It was just before the president walked in the room that I had to tell Claudia, my two-year-old daughter, “No, you cannot take your clothes off.” She wanted to wear a sheet, which is what she likes to do at home. She started screaming. As he walked in we said: “Look, Claudia, it’s Barack Obama" That’s when she threw herself on the floor," Laura Moser writes on The Guardian This was our seventh Passover seder at the White House.
The tradition started on the campaign trail in 2008 when my husband Arun (who was then Obama’s videographer; he’s at the back of the picture) and a few other staffers held an impromptu seder, the traditional Passover meal, in a hotel in a small town in Pennsylvania. Obama has hosted one at the White House for roughly the same 20 people every year since. We read out the Emancipation Proclamation, which is an Obama innovation.
It is really powerful to hear the first black president read aloud about freeing the slaves, which is what Passover is all about, but in a different context. Every year we bring a family member who joins us for mingling and photographs, and then takes the children home before the seder begins.
Last year we took my father, who you can see standing just behind the president. Claudia was on the floor for only a second; I didn’t actually just let her lie there, as some internet commenters accused me of doing after the photograph went viral. I am looking at my dad, saying, “All right, time to go.”
He had to drag her out and she screamed as they walked down the corridor with the secret service escort. We weren’t thrilled, but I wasn’t particularly anxious about it. Everyone wants their children to be cute and smile for the president. But Obama just makes everyone feel at ease – you don’t feel awestruck because he is so human. Neither he nor the first lady cared that Claudia was screaming. It was funny. You can see Obama turning to Pete Souza, the official White House photographer, like, “Check this out.” The beauty of kids is they don’t care who you are, which is why people like the Obamas like them so much – they treat them like normal people.
A month or two later I was sent the photo and posted it on Facebook for family and friends. I didn’t see the storm coming. My brother tweeted it and tagged me. I was shopping and didn’t see my phone until I got back and had 118 new notifications. It went from there.
It was crazy to watch it. think Claudia will like the photograph when she is old enought to understand it. We have it framed next to another picture of her with Obama sniffing her hair, when she was four months old; he said, “She still has that new baby smell.” Arun worked for Obama for four years, and we have pictures of my son Leo with him at Halloween over the years.
Obama posed with Leo whose costumes included Franklin D Roosevelt, a secret service agent and, when he was two, Thomas Jefferson. I used to think it was a shame Claudia never got in those sorts of pictures, but she’s surpassed him in one shot.
Source: The UK Guardian
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