Times New RomanHey 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.