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President Park has come under criticism recently for her heavy handed treatment of protesters, and even for making statements comparing masked protesters to ISIS. She isn’t winning many hearts and minds—particularly with the young crowd—and due to her privileged upbringing she’s been accused of being too far detached from the regular guy.
Thanks to a recent statistical report tongue-in-cheek article sent to us by Matt McGrath, we fortunately now have the tools to assess the inter-personal relations acumen of Park Geun Hye, Obama, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un, by observing whether or not they welcome their umbrella-less walking companions underneath their personal umbrellas during a rainstorm. In the article (which is in Korean, but the photos do the writing) Obama does well, sacrificing his right shoulder to a deluge of rain drops in order that his fellow walkers might stay dry underneath the full expanse of his presidential umbrella. Xi also performs similarly well with evidence presented from his recent trip to England.
Park, on the other hand, fares poorly; in two separate instances she leaves her walking partners exposed to the elements while she herself enjoys the full dryness that an umbrella provides. One has to imagine that after months of each leader's staff coordinating every minute detail of their meetings in order to avoid all manner of faux pas, they forgot to address the issue of what happens when it’s raining, you have an umbrella, and the person next to you doesn’t. Perhaps we should give her the benefit of the doubt and she just wasn’t thinking too quickly on her feet at the moment, or maybe her walking partners declined her kind umbrella service overtures.
Whatever the case, she is in pleasant company with her North Korean counterpart Kim Jong Un, who also makes an appearance in the article, naturally in a dry state underneath his umbrella whilst leaving some hapless official to weather the tempest alone.
