A Shared Office Would Amplify ‘Two Presidents for the Price of One’ Effect
Increasingly confident that Hillary will win the Democratic nomination and be elected president, the Bill and Hillary Clinton have hired an architect to redesign the Oval Office so that the two of them could share it.
Jerome Winterblast, a renowned specialist in oval-shaped office spaces, declined to confirm or deny that the Clintons had retained him. But sources close to “Mr Oval” — as he is known in architectural circles — said Winterblast had already prepared some preliminary drawings of what a dual Clinton Oval Office might look like.
In the drawings, each of the Clintons would sit at a desk, though Bill Clinton’s desk would be slightly behind Hillary’s from the perspective of a visitor entering the office.
“As would befit the President, Mrs. Cllnton’s placement in the office would signify the alpha, but, to the surprise of many, Bill’s desk is just as large as hers,” the source said. “It’s clear that their’s would be a shared office with all the subtleties of sharing the power of the presidency that such an arrangement would imply.”
It was unclear to what extent the shared Oval Office might be a ceremonial office and whether Hillary and Bill would each have a private “working” office just down the hall from the Oval Office.
“If this sharing of an office is true, obviously it would be unprecedented in the history of the presidency,” said Rathbun Mortimer, professor of government at Harvard University and a scholar of the presidency. “Such a frank sharing of power that such an office arrangement suggests would certainly be outside of what the founding fathers intended. They were very clear about the concept of the solo president.”
Professor Mortimer said he would “almost prefer to see Hillary as president and Bill as vice president, rather than have them dilute the potency of the presidency.”