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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mr. Whist who wrote (169174)	8/8/2001 11:42:11 PM
From: puborectalis	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

"Most Americans can’t take as much time off as President Bush does. The Washington Post totted up his non-office time — an amazing 42 percent of his total time in the White House so far. A new Gallup Poll found that that 55 percent of the American people thought that the president was taking too long of a vacation, while 42 per cent thought it wasn’t too long. (The other 3 percent, I’m guessing, were on vacation.) If I were Bush I wouldn’t worry too much. First of all, “Waco in the Heat” is not anyone’s idea of a “cushy vacation.” It’s not like he’s fled D.C. for Tuscany, Atlantis or even for Six Flags over Texas. Who’s going to begrudge him a month in a furnace? WHAT’S TO DO IN D.C.? There isn’t, frankly, a whole lot for him to do in D.C. in August. Congress is gone until Labor Day. Most of the Punditocracy is gone, too. Alan Greenspan and the IMF are running the world economy, which is weak, but not collapsing. What precisely would Bush be doing in the Oval Office? Sending in the Marines to stop all cloning? There are other reasons, political and personal, for Bush’s retreat to Texas. For one, he’s making a political statement: that the nation’s capital is not the center of wisdom and virtue in America, the “heartland” is. He’s taking his cue not from his own father, but from Ronald Reagan, who managed always to seem that he was in, but not of, Washington — and whose favorite activity was clearing brush on his California ranch. Plus a long vacation can have another use: It’s a good time to drop a political bombshell. Bush is planning to do so soon with his decision on stem-cell research. Better to do that in the “heartland” in the dead of August than in the East Room this fall. But most of the breezes that blew Bush to Texas are personal. For one, the guy really is a Texan. Yes he went Up East to fancy schools, but he revels in the good ol’ dirt-kickin’ sense of Texasness, which is a form of local chauvinism on steroids. He genuinely doesn’t like Washington. I think he actually loathes the place, which, after all, is full of lawyers, reporters, Democrats and shrinks — four types of people he can’t stand. A PRIVATE MAN He’s a more private person than most people understand. He’s a party guy, but under controlled circumstances. He’s a fraternity man, literally and figuratively, and only likes to let his hair down with people he truly trusts — and behind guarded walls if available. The Prairie Chapel ranch has 1,500 acres: a moat of dirt around his unpretentious (and energy-efficient) fieldstone hacienda on the flat terrain near Crawford. What about the length of the vacation — and all that other time away from the White House? Well, Bush would be the last person in the world to call himself a workaholic. He wants to know what he needs to know, but not an ounce more and not a minute before he needs to know it. When he makes a decision he cleans his desk — and clears his mind. He doesn’t look back, doesn’t second guess. Also, Bill Clinton gave a bad name to burning the midnight oil. It turned out that he wasn’t staying up all night merely on behalf of the American people. He had his own needs to satisfy. I know this will sound silly, even pathetic, to some, but Bush is pacing himself. He’s a marathoner by nature. He has the chutzpah to think that he’s going to be president for two terms. He wants to stay in shape, his batteries charged, for challenges ahead. And there WILL be challenges, sooner or later. Then we’ll see if all that time in Texas was worth it, to him and to us." Howard Fineman is Newsweek’s chief political correspondent and an NBC News analyst.