I was frankly just bewildered by this Bush-butt-kissing article in the
NY Times.
It seems Bush is making himself over for his second term. He wants to be remembered as the "impishly fun" president!
At a news conference last week, Mr. Bush joked that he did not have the time "to sit around and wander, lonely, in the Oval Office, kind of asking different portraits, 'How do you think my standing will be?' "
And at the end of an interview with a Belgian television correspondent last month, Mr. Bush blurted out to the young woman that she had "great eyes," glanced away slyly and then a little sheepishly, but for the most part seemed sorry that the session was over.
Is this a new George Bush?
White House officials insist not and say that the frisky president people are seeing in public is simply the one he has kept private for the last four years.
"Frisky!"
The mind boggles. Read the whole article and you'll get a picture of a Bush who frankly just doesn't give a damn anymore. And yet the article is written in a fawning tone that will have the average reader thinking "aww, he's just a guy like me".
These days Mr. Bush's chief form of exercise is biking - he no longer runs since his knees gave out last year - and he has taken it on with the same aggressiveness as he did his old 6:45 miles. "He's turned into a bike maniac," said Mark McKinnon, a biking buddy of the president who was also his chief media strategist during the 2004 campaign. "He grinds, and he goes flat out from beginning to end."
Mr. Bush, he added, had lost eight pounds since the election. "He's as calm and relaxed and confident and happy as I've ever seen him," Mr. McKinnon said. Despite the beating he has taken on Social Security, other advisers say, Mr. Bush still presents a cheery face to the staff. "People are not walking around with their heads hung on Social Security," said Joshua B. Bolten, the White House budget director. "When we have our Social Security meetings, and those are often very detailed, substantive meetings, he's consistently upbeat."
Clay Johnson III, the deputy director for management in the White House budget office and Mr. Bush's roommate at Yale, had a simple explanation for the president's mood: "He never, ever has to run for office again."
That impish smirk says to me "Ha! I'm sure pulling a fast one on the American people! I get to live in the big white house for 4 more years and they'll pay all my dry cleaning bills!"