The president who has taken more time off than any of his predecessors, including each of the last three Augusts, sounds like he’d like this summer to be like the others. Unfortunately for Bush, a certain annoyance — running for president — is getting in the way.
[T]he 2004 campaign has ruined Mr. Bush’s Texas vacation. Or put another way, if Mr. Bush doesn’t give up a lot of his summer holiday, the fear at the White House is that he could be on a permanent one after the first of the year.
“The decision was made awhile ago,” a Bush adviser said Friday. “The president will spend a good portion of his time traveling in August as we head toward the convention.” The adviser spoke on condition of anonymity because the president’s August schedule is still in some flux.
Final details are to come, but the bottom line is that Mr. Bush will spend only two weeks at the ranch compared with his usual four.
Poor guy.
At a minimum, however, it’s good to know what, exactly, will help drag Bush away from his leisurely brush clearing.
No, it’s not the threat of an imminent terrorist attack.
Throughout that summer [of 2001], we now well know, Tenet, Richard Clarke, and several other officials were running around with their “hair on fire,” warning that al-Qaida was about to unleash a monumental attack. On Aug. 6, Bush was given the now-famous President’s Daily Brief (by one of Tenet’s underlings), warning that this attack might take place “inside the United States.” For the previous few years — as Philip Zelikow, the commission’s staff director, revealed this morning — the CIA had issued several warnings that terrorists might fly commercial airplanes into buildings or cities.
And now, we learn today, at this peak moment, Tenet hears about Moussaoui. Someone might have added 2 + 2 + 2 and possibly busted up the conspiracy. But the president was down on the ranch, taking it easy. Tenet wasn’t with him. Tenet never talked with him. Rice — as she has testified — wasn’t with Bush, either. He was on his own and, willfully, out of touch.
Instead, the need to campaign seems to be the only thing that can interrupt Bush’s slumber.
The last time Mr. Bush was running for president, he opened August at the Republican convention in Philadelphia and spent most of the rest of the month in a campaign sprint across the country. The Bushes had bought their Crawford ranch the year before, in 1999, and during the 2000 campaign were still building their house on the land. Mr. Bush did not vacation at the ranch until the following August in a 27-day idyll that was attacked by the Democrats. Later it became a symbol of what critics said was the administration’s sleepiness before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which occurred less than two weeks after the president returned from Texas.
But Mr. Bush still spent 27 days at the ranch in August 2002 and 29 days there in August 2003. (The numbers are courtesy of Mark Knoller of CBS News, whose records rival those of the White House.) Mr. Bush’s pattern in those years was to disappear for the first week of vacation, reappear to attend an economic forum (2002) or to look at damage from forest fires (2002 and 2003), disappear again, then re-emerge for a few more political trips and a fund-raising swing through California.
So, politics can cut the president’s vacations short, but matters of state apparently cannot. To paraphrase one of Bush’s new ads: Bush has his priorities; are they yours?