Hey all,

A little something to maybe brighten your day, care of the New York 
Times.  Our President is too much fun.  His quotes are just great.

-Phil

White House Memo: Amazing Amazement in Bush at Play

By FRANK BRUNI

ENNEBUNKPORT, Me., July 8 — Reporters learned many things about 
President Bush on his first summer vacation. Perhaps the most 
interesting was his amazing capacity for amazement.

On Friday, Mr. Bush's 55th birthday, he was suffused with wonder by the 
realization that he and an Associated Press reporter who was marking his 
own birthday would share that connection again.

"The amazing thing," Mr. Bush said, was that "we'll have our birthday on 
the same day again next year."

On Saturday, what astonished him was that even here, in a craggy seaside 
resort so far in spirit from Washington, he could not quite leave the 
capital behind. His morning golf game was to be followed by work-related 
talks with his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and his 
chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr.

"The amazing thing about this job," the president said as he played at 
Cape Arundel Golf Club, "is the job seems to follow you around."

What is more amazing to many Bush watchers is how easily he seems to 
ditch it. Although the three and a half days he spent here with his 
parents at the family's waterfront compound was a longer break than 
usual, it was hardly the president's first weekend away.

If his helicopter rides to and from Camp David yielded frequent flier 
miles, he might be close to a free round-trip domestic ticket by now. If 
his flights to and from his ranch in Crawford, Tex., were added to the 
equation, he might be nearing business class to Europe.

But Mr. Bush's activities this weekend proved that policy meetings and 
his workday were not the only things he occasionally sprinted through. 
He and his father managed 18 holes of golf on Friday morning in about 2 
hours and 15 minutes. They took only a few minutes more when they 
returned to the fairways on Saturday morning. In each case, they were 
done well before 10 a.m.

As for a dinner on Saturday night at the Lobster Pot, that, too, was no 
cause for lingering. Mr. Bush, several friends and an array of 
relatives, including his parents, were in and out in an hour and a half.

The degree to which the family is worshiped around here is positively 
amazing, and there were reminders of it everywhere. At the Lobster Pot, 
a 9-year-old girl stood across the street holding a sign that said, "Mr. 
Bush, you're doing a great job," and the owners of a Great Dane had 
saddled it with a Bush/Cheney campaign sign.

Local drugstores and souvenir shops sell more than a half-dozen kinds of 
postcards celebrating the Bush connection to Kennebunkport, with 
photographs that bathe the family home in a beatific light. People 
stroll or drive slowly past the Bush compound with their gazes fixed on 
the property, like bird-watchers eager to log at least one George, 
perhaps a Barbara or a Laura and maybe even a Jeb.

Tonight they had the additional possibility of a Gorbachev. Mikhail S. 
Gorbachev, the former leader of the former Soviet Union, was due to 
arrive to pay a social visit to former President George Bush, and was to 
stay until Tuesday.

The current President Bush left late this afternoon, after a day that 
involved fishing but, alas, no golf. It was replaced this morning by his 
attendance at a 55-minute church service that began at 8 a.m.

Mr. Bush does not come here all that often and expresses a greater 
affection for the sweltering plains around Crawford, which has fewer 
tees, is less twee and better bolsters his presentation of himself as an 
earthy, unpretentious guy.

Kennebunkport offers little assistance in that regard. The golf club at 
which Mr. Bush played on Friday and Saturday has a membership roster 
that reads like a family tree — Bushes and Ellises and Pierces and a 
Walker — and underscores the privilege of his pedigree.

Ditto for the photographs and television coverage of his vacation. On 
Friday, as new unemployment figures painted a newly troubling portrait 
of the American economy, Mr. Bush placed himself in the same scenes — 
golfing and fishing in a New England paradise — that once caused his 
father electoral grief.

Simply amazing.