US President Barack Obama and former US president George H W Bush arrive for the “Daily Point of Light” award in the East Room of the White House in Washington yesterday.
WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama welcomed President George H W Bush to the White House yesterday in a salute to public service and to the drive for volunteerism that the 41st president inspired with his “thousand points of light” initiative more than two decades ago.
“We are surely a kinder and gentler nation because of you,” Obama told the elder Bush, who sat in a room filled with his friends and former aides.
The first President Bush — “41,” he often calls himself — came to attend a ceremony Obama was holding to recognise the 5,000th Daily Point of Light Award.
The award’s name comes from the description in his 1989 inaugural address of Americans serving each other as “a thousand points of light.”
Thanks to Bush, Obama said, “volunteerism has gone from something that some people do some of the time to something that lots of people do as a regular part of their lives.”
Bush responded briefly, thanking the Obamas for their “wonderful hospitality,” and leaving his son Neil Bush to offer more extended remarks.
In addition to Neil Bush, the former president was joined by his wife, Barbara, the former first lady; and Michelle Nunn, CEO of the Points of Light organisation and a possible Democratic Senate candidate from Georgia. She’s the daughter of former Senator Sam Nunn.
President George W Bush, the 41st president’s son, did not attend. Obama and first lady Michelle Obama and the Bushes had lunch in the Red Room before the ceremony.
Obama announced creation of a federal task force to come up with new ways for the public and private sectors to collaborate to support national service as a means of tackling national priorities.
In the past year, the Corporation for National and Community Service, sponsor of the AmeriCorps national service program, launched partnerships with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Education Department.
The 1,600-member FEMA Corps has the sole mission of responding to disasters. School Turnaround AmeriCorps will send 650 volunteers into low-performing schools this fall to help improve academic achievement, attendance, high school graduation rates, and college and career readiness. Both presidents share a commitment to volunteerism and service.
Bush, 89, established the Daily Point of Light Award in 1990 while in office. More than 1,000 of the awards were distributed between 1989 and 1993, Bush’s single term as the nation’s 41st president. AP
