I Get It Now

When I was 13 or 14 years old, I had a paper route. When I first started off, all I thought about was the money... $20 or $30 a week. However, soon it became about dragging my ass out of bed at 6:15 in the morning, and rain or not, 20-degrees below zero in a blizzard or not, I had to peddle around town with 30 pounds digging the newspaper satchel strap into my shoulder for an hour every day... 60 pounds on Sundays.

I've heard Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton all give the same response to questions: Being the president starts off as the greatest job ever... but after 4 years (and especially after 8) of sleeping 4 or 5 hours a night, working 19 or 20 hours a day, cameras always turned on, political considerations never turned off, even the most hardcore workaholic comes to a point where the job becomes nothing more than a damn-weather, damn-satchel-strap, can't-do-this-anymore, living hell.

George W. Bush is the last person I would tag as a workaholic. His 5-week vacations, and his staff of Those-Who-Handle-Things-Without-Me attest to that. Give him credit though: He knew what being president meant, and he took steps to surround himself with people who would effectively handle things before 8:00 a.m. and after 8:00 p.m. ... as well as a good chunk of the work and thoughtload during the day.

Clinton and Reagan (and members of their staffs) say that the second term is when the administration really begins to click; when White House staffers act with much more autonomy and can call the shots independent of the President.

George W. was counting on that. He was counting on the weight of the second term of his presidency to dig much less into his shoulder, the weather to be much friendlier, the second time around.

Wrong-o dude.

Carl Rove's involvement with the Valerie Plame leak has George biting his nails a little bit. (After all, does Bush want to fire the guy known lovingly as "Bush's Brain"?) The war in Iraq is neither improving nor getting to the point where some drastic action is needed... it is just a stagnating, pin-pricking, annoying, always-something-wrong quagmire. He has a rightwing constituency pulling him one way, a Republican congress another way, and an American public a third way. The media that used to report every White House press release as the "only" truth on any given story are now adding in paragraphs to those stories that begin with "But according to..." and presenting versions of reality that contradict the official White House line. Now, the President has a soldier's angry mother camped out in front of his vacation residence, and 100,000 angry and wet people in New Orleans to deal with. The old "Criticize me and you criticize America / Support the troops / Either-with-us-or-against-us" line isn't flying anymore.

In other words, the executive branch is dealing with more and more shit every day that passes... right at the moment that the president was hoping to see himself as a ribbon-cutting, speech-making, hand-shaking, first-pitch-of-the-season, relaxed-on-the-job elder statesman.

It really pisses him off.

No... you can see it in his eyes. When giving a speech, he looks noncommital. When listenening to someone else's speech, he is patently bored. He is going through the motions on photo ops that are staged so that they can speak for him to the point where he he doesn't have to rely on character or content. Everybody knows he lothes giving impromptu comments, unprepared statements, or answering questions that have not been screened in advance to avoid the stress of mistake or debate. His public appearances are attended only by people who fill out applications of allegiance so that the atmosphere he operates in is always supportive.

George Bush hates being the President. He doesn't want to do it anymore. The strap is digging in too sharply. The weather sucks. The hours suck. The payoff is shit.

And he realizes that he still has 3½ more years to go and there is nothing he can do about it.