DrMaddVibe wrote:.
"There's no such thing as a presidential vacation," Carney said. "The presidency travels with you."
Oh the sweet sweet irony!!! Look at what the then cub reporter for Newsweek magazine had to say about then President Bush and his "vacations"!!!![b]By Jay Carney
The image-makers who advise George W. Bush got what they wanted this week: a photograph, taken by the Associated Press and published in seemingly every newspaper in the country, of the President lifting a telephone pole as he "helped maintain" a nature trail in Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park.
Back in July, when they were planning what the President should do during his month-long vacation (as part of their effort to persuade the public that he wasn't actually on vacation in the generally accepted sense of what vacation means — i.e., having fun and not working), the image-makers hit upon a clever idea. Every week, they decided, they would send the President somewhere outside Texas for a day or a day and a half to hold an event of some kind in which he would mix with "real Americans."
(See TIME's photoessay "Presidential Days at the Beach.")
The events would have little in common, except for the fact that they would be held far from Washington in the middle of August. But to tie them together, to make it seem as though the President were engaged in some concentrated activity of presidential purpose, they would name the entire series of trips — together with his down time at his ranch in Crawford, Texas — the "Home to the Heartland" tour.
During his first week of vacation, Bush ventured all the way to Waco —about 25 minutes from Crawford — to "help build" a house with Habitat for Humanity. Though Bush actually spent about 15 minutes doing anything, the print media dutifully reported his activity. More importantly, of course, the images of Bush at work on a good deed were carried across the nation on television and in photographs.
(See TIME's photoessay "World Leaders on Vacation.")
The same was true of this week's stop in the Rockies. Bush didn't actually help build that trail so much as he posed for the cameras as he simulated the act of helping build the trail. While the President also gave a speech at the national park, the image-makers shrewdly pinpointed the real value of both visits: It's the newsreels and photographs showing the President as a regular guy who cares about the poor and cares about the environment. Both were classic examples of that much maligned but ever-reliable staple of political activity: the "photo-op."
Now, I'm not going to feign shock at the fact that this President is using photo ops in an attempt — some might say a cynical attempt — to influence public opinion. It would be news if he weren't doing just that. But it is worth noting that in the same week that Bush ventured to a pristine piece of the country to help maintain a nature trail and to tout the money he's put in his budget to help restore national parks, the news out of Washington carried a very different message. The Washington Post ran an article about the Bush Administration's likely plan to rescind a Clinton-era executive order that forbids road-building (and therefore logging) on 60 million acres of public land. And several newspapers published pieces about the Environmental Protection Agency's pending decision on whether to loosen the rules governing toxic emissions from factories, a move heavily favored, not surprisingly, by the industries affected.
The President's most glaring weakness is the public's perception that he is pro-business and anti-environment. Given the high marks he's getting for his overall job performance and his deft handling of the stem cell research question, some might even say it's his only weakness. The question now is whether a few photo-ops will fix the problem — or just make it worse.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/columnist/carney/article/0,9565,171496,00.html#ixzz1UkVIwx6l
