Obama's tango ripped on 'Morning Joe' 'Baseball games and tangos, that’s inconsistent with the seriousness of the day,' Richard Haass says.

On Wednesday evening, President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama danced the tango at a state dinner in Argentina. By the next morning, a bipartisan chorus of disapproval of the optics was bursting out on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

Obama should not have canceled his trip to Argentina after the attacks in Brussels, said Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, but his recent photo op at a baseball game in Cuba and his tango left much to be desired.


“Argentina is actually one of the very rare good news stories in the world,” Haass said, referring to the government’s transition from former President Cristina Kirchner. “You have a new democratic government. They’re doing the right things economically, they’re doing the right things politically. It’s a good story.”

“However, the advance person who let him do the tango, that person ought to be looking for work on somebody’s — in somebody’s campaign very, very far away,” Haass remarked. “That was a tremendous mistake. It’s fine to go to Argentina, you want to do the work, but you’ve got to be careful of these little photo ops and optics. Baseball games and tangos, that’s inconsistent with the seriousness of the day.”

Obama attended the first few innings of a baseball game between the Cuban national team and the Tampa Bay Rays in Havana on Tuesday, sporting sunglasses and participating in an on-air interview with ESPN on the same day that more than 30 people were killed and hundreds injured in Brussels, Belgium. Co-host Mika Brzezinski pronounced the look “really strange to me” despite Obama’s stated goal of showing that terrorists couldn’t disrupt his schedule.

“One of my proudest moments as president was watching Boston” in 2013, Obama told reporters Wednesday in defending the optics of his attendance at the baseball game. “A few days later, folks were out shopping. A few days later, people were in that baseball stadium and singing the national anthem and Big Papi was saying what he felt about Boston, Boston strong, and how a terrorist attack was not going to change the basic spirit of that city.”

As panelists on "Morning Joe" acknowledged, Obama has often found himself in the precarious position of being away from Washington when tragedy has struck.

When the Islamic State beheaded American journalist James Foley in August 2014, the president conducted business on vacation from Martha's Vineyard. Rather than pause a trip to Asia following last November's attacks in Paris, Obama continued with his plans, traveling to the site of the Bataclan nightclub massacre two weeks later while in town for the United Nations Climate Conference. Less than a year into his presidency, Obama responded from vacationing in Hawaii to an attempted bombing of a trans-Atlantic flight as it landed in Detroit on Christmas Day 2009.

For Nicolle Wallace, the former communications director for George W. Bush, Obama’s tango and baseball game amounted to a “communications crime.”

Referring to former CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden, who on Wednesday said Obama’s actions reflect a lack of concern about terrorism, Wallace called it the president’s “policy choice.”

“His policy choice was to proceed with everything on his schedule and not to react to the threat of terrorism and that is his prerogative,m but it puts him vastly … out of step with the entire American public, not just Republicans,” she said. “You heard Democrats yesterday increasingly uncomfortable with the choices he makes at a moment of crisis. There were mothers laying dead while their, you know, family members were at the crime scene yesterday and to look like the priority is to go on a foreign trip instead of pausing for a minute and explaining that to America is a communications crime.”

Even Steve Rattner, a financier and Hillary Clinton bundler, said the tango and interview with ESPN could have been handled differently. But he disagreed with Wallace that Obama should have returned to Washington.

“I think he could have handled some of that differently. I agree certainly about the tango,” Rattner said. “But the idea that some people are throwing out that he should have, like, turned the plane around and rushed back to Washington. To do what?”