If he stayed up late, they would be bad mouthing that.
WHITE HOUSE LETTER - NYT
It's 10 O'Clock. Do You Know Where Your President Is? In Bed.
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
On Sunday night President Bush spent two hours watching a gala at Ford's Theater. On Wednesday he will spend an hour at a St. Patrick's Day lunch on Capitol Hill. On Tuesday he will spend something less than an hour with the prime minister of the Netherlands. And, of course, he will spend an hour each day in exercise.
Americans might surmise from at least some of these activities that the president of the United States has time to burn. That was certainly the point last week of Senator John Kerry, who slammed Mr. Bush for spending as much time with cows in Houston as the president had allotted for his testimony to the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.
"If the president of the United States can find time to go to a rodeo, he can find the time to do more than one hour in front of a commission that is investigating what happened to America's intelligence," said Mr. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
The White House response was that Mr. Bush would answer all the commission's questions, and that he might go over the hour allotted. "Nobody's watching the clock," Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said on Tuesday.
But on Sunday, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, fired a warning shot at the commission on behalf of her boss. "I would hope that they would recognize that he's president, and people would be judicious in the use of his time," she said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
Underneath the political back-and-forth is a more substantive campaign issue that illuminates the nature of a presidency: How does the leader of the free world use his most precious commodity, time?
With vigilance, at least in the case of the 43rd president. As with so much else, Mr. Bush is the mirror opposite of Bill Clinton, who routinely ran late and let meetings turn into seminars. In Mr. Bush's world, if he is not on time, he is a half-hour early; his aides say he does everything fast, including eating meals.
To his supporters, Bush Time reflects the president's discipline and focus. To his critics, it reflects rigidity and a lack of curiosity. Either way, meetings are over fast.
"There's a little joking around, but he gets right to it," said a Republican supporter who meets with Mr. Bush but did not want to be named because White House aides get angry when people talk about their closeness to the president. "He also knows how to keep others on the topic. When they veer off, he'll move them quickly back to the subject. There's not a lot of intellectual wandering going on, because he's busy. He knows what he wants to get out of a meeting."
Out of any given 24 hours in Washington, Mr. Bush will generally spend 11 hours working, 7 hours sleeping and 6 other hours in the White House residence.
To break it down further, the president is generally awake by 5 a.m., when he has coffee and reads the newspapers in bed with his wife. By 7 a.m. he is in the Oval Office, where he makes calls, often to leaders overseas or his parents, before his national security briefing at 8.
For the rest of the day, Mr. Bush is in more meetings — with the National Security Council, his campaign staff, his domestic policy staff, his speechwriters. He often eats a lunch of salad alone while he channel-surfs in a small dining room off the Oval Office. He exercises in the White House gym, usually in the late morning or early evening. Either way, he's back at the residence around 6 for dinner at 7. The teetotaling president retires around 9 p.m., even when he has guests, and takes to bed a giant briefing book to read as preparation for the following day. Lights are out at 10.
"I've been in both White Houses, and dinner with Clinton was a freewheeling conversation that could go into the wee hours of the morning," said the Rev. Eugene F. Rivers 3rd, the president of the National Ten Point Leadership Foundation, a coalition that represents primarily black churches.
But Mr. Rivers said that when he had dinner and a sleepover at the White House last December, "one gets a sense of time being ordered and directed" — even down to the butler who fetched Mr. Rivers and his wife from a reception on the state floor of the White House to tell them that the first couple were ready to dine with them upstairs. "It was on the dime — 7:35," Mr. Rivers recalled.
Donald Etra, a Los Angeles lawyer and a Yale classmate of Mr. Bush, said that if the president tells him to be at the Oval Office at 12:45, "you'd better be there at 12:45, if not earlier." Mr. Etra added, "And if we are leaving the White House to go to an official function, you are there on time, or you get left behind."
Mr. Bush, it should be noted, spent one hour at the Houston rodeo last week. There he patted some cows on the head and said, briefly, "I thought there was a lot of bull in Washington, D.C."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |
