Photograph by Mark Wilson/AP Photo
The Jefferson Hotel in Washington.
President Barack Obama has invited Republican senators to dinner tonight.
Yet this is no White House dinner.
It’s an off-campus soiree, at the Jefferson Hotel.
Sen. John McCain of Arizona, Obama’s opponent in the 2008 election, is among the several senators meeting for dinner. So is his friend, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.
The Jefferson dates to 1923, when Calvin Coolidge was new in town. It started as The Jefferson Apartment, of Beaux Arts design, and became a hotel in 1955. It has undergone a “top-to-bottom” renovation over two years that in 2009 yielded a new boutique hotel with 99 rooms, a spa, private dining rooms and a rediscovered lobby skylight that had been covered over.
The dinner several blocks from the White House is “subject to postponement if the weather deteriorates,” the White House says.
