President Bush may not have asked questions about Hurricane Katrina and doesn't remember how the Iraqi army got disbanded, but he sure is vocal about his ice cream and mountain bike trails! You can protest that these are unfair anecdotes, but they fit with a larger pattern -- Bush used to take two-hour lunches in Texas while rubber-stamping execution reviews in fifteen minutes.
Update 9/5 9:21 PM: Michael Crowley's readers flagged this related passage from Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty:
Bush looked impatiently at [Andy] Card, hard-eyed. "You're the chief of staff. You think you're up to getting us some cheeseburgers?"
Card nodded. No one laughed. He all but raced out of the room.
The President uses humor and friendliness to smooth over difficult situations, but I really think it's more of a sales technique than genuine. He throws out the pitch too much, I can see some in the Press Corp getting weary of it. He's the kind of guy that schmoozes you, then talks about you when you leave the room. When he's stressed, he seems to lose all semblance of his frat boy self.
His problem, I think, is that he doesn't define a clear boundary of what his role is. So some people don't know if he's about to be "George" or "The President". Is he joking or serious?
Posted by: Sean-B | September 07, 2007 at 06:12 AM