After a summer-long brawl over entitlements, the tax code and debt-to-GDP ratios, we’re now left to debate the president’s vacation destination.
Doldrums.
“Now is not the time for a president to go on vacation. We need a president, hard at work, helping to find the way to solve our massive problems,” Dick Morris, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton, wrote Wednesday in USA Today.
I’ve had a peculiar fascination with presidential retreats ever since Bill Clinton (at Morris’ polling-based urging, it turns out) vacationed in Wyoming 16 years ago.
In 1995, after Whitewater but before Monica Lewinsky, the White House announced that Clinton would be bringing the family to Jackson Hole for his August vacation.
As a young-and-dumb sports editor for one of the two fiercely competitive newspapers in town, I presumed I’d have some sort of assignment. Maybe interviewing golfers who crossed Bubba’s path for news of an extra mulligan or foot wedge. Or possibly finding a well-placed river rat to spill details after the first family braved whitewater, Snake River Canyon-style.
I didn’t figure to be plucked from the playground and thrown into the White House press pool.
But that’s what happened.
Handed my assignment, a Motorola cellular phone the size of a cinder block and instructions not to screw up, I dove in.
Turns out, working in the presidential pool while Clinton vacationed required but three skills: the ability to find a unique angle amid a series of carefully crafted photo ops; the patience to spend hours sitting around as he played golf; and suggestions on where to go drinking at night.
In the endless hours held hostage on a country club patio waiting for the president to two-putt the 18th hole at the Jackson Hole Golf & Tennis Club, I entertained the Washington press corps with my inability to operate the Motorola brick and we swapped stories of the people and places we covered.
Somehow during that visit, I landed a couple of minor scoops and did well enough that the higher- ups decided, within weeks, to just go ahead and make me editor of the newspaper. Seriously.
Sixteen years later, I’m still an editor. And I’ve learned that, when it comes to chronicling presidential vacations, Mark Knoller of CBS News is the man.
For those pondering the message of Martha’s Vineyard, Knoller offers up a few facts.
After 31 months in office, Obama has taken 61 vacation days, Knoller reported last week. At this point in their presidencies, George W. Bush had spent 180 days at his ranch, Ronald Reagan had taken 112 vacation days at his ranch, and Clinton had taken a mere 28 days off.
Last week, Knoller tweeted these details: “During last summer’s 11day MV ‘vacation,’ Pres Obama played 5 rounds of golf on 3 different courses, did 2 family picnics & 3 dinners out.”
That kind of leisure activity, apparently, has Morris worked up.
“A president hard at work, meeting with world leaders and domestic experts, might project the impression that there was light at the end of the tunnel. It might bolster confidence. But a president splashing around in the surf on Martha’s Vineyard conveys no such sense of leadership or even one of particular concern,” he wrote last week.
Personally, I think the only thing Obama needs to worry about while on vacation is being photographed riding a bike. Seriously. Do a Google images search for “Obama” and “vacation.”
I’ll gladly settle for the candids showing him shirtless in the surf over the Urkel-evoking images of him wobbling atop a two-wheeler while decked out in his mom jeans and running shoes.
Beyond that, I have the same august advice for Obama as I do for the people who would criticize his decision to take a vacation with his family.
Chill out.
E-mail Curtis Hubbard at chubbard@denverpost.com.
