If I danced with President Obama I would whisper in his ear that I am crazy about his exciting marriage.  

"Yes we can."

I love you so don’t screw up.

If I were to be so lucky as to dance with the new president at an Inaugural ball, I would simply whisper to him, "God bless you, Mr. President – and may you save this nation from itself. I’m with you all the way!"

Click here on this text to read my New York Post column.

"I’m married." Oops, no, that would have been for presidents Kennedy, Johnson or Clinton.

If I were to dance with Obama, I would urge him to get a Labradoodle, not a Portugese water dog. Dogs I know. Taxes I don’t.

If I were dancing with Obama tonight, I would whisper that he should cut capital gains taxes, get rid of the estate tax and appoint my close friend the artist William Dunlap as the head of the national endowment of the arts or humanities or both. I spent Sunday night making the rounds of Inaugural parties with him, and yesterday enjoying a long and lovely lunch (at Cafe Milano, the best and most fun restaurant in DC) that he co-hosted with Lucky Roosevelt, the former Reagan chief of protocol, with a diverse guest list of Democrats and Republicans, including my very dear Mississippi senator Thad Cochran.

An old-fashioned, unreconstructed liberal, Dunlap knows everyone and likes most of them (at one party he – unbelievably — had Marine Corps General James Jones, Obama’s national security adviser, laughing out loud at his tales of being a draft dodger, and then sat down for a long visit with former FBI Chief William Webster). He has enormous generosity of spirit and is, unusually in my experience for an artist, a tireless promoter of other artists’ work (I have come to know and love the photographer Sally Mann through him). He is a great painter, sculptor, writer, enlightened student of history and general force of nature. He is on the board of the museum I chair in New Orleans, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, where he works like a dog, and where they recently showed his Panorama of American Landscape, a work commissioned in 1984 by Washington’s Corcoran Gallery for their rotunda. A contemporary answer to the historical cycloramas of the 19th century, it is a work in 14 panels and it never fails to take my breath away.

THANK YOU.