海角大神

I vowed that this year I would not engage in the annual 鈥淭he president is on vacation now?!鈥� madness. In past years when I鈥檝e engaged in this debate, I felt a little like Clark Griswold persuading his family to go to Walleye World (more on that below). As I鈥檝e noted in previous columns, the 鈥渄iscussion鈥� is typically a partisan exercise in which both sides defend the necessity of their guy taking a vacation and/or point out that the other team鈥檚 guy took many more. It is a silly debate, beginning with the effort to numerically document 鈥渧acation days." The New York Times is the latest media outlet to fall prey to this infantile exercise. Let鈥檚 be clear 鈥� the purported measures that papers like the Times report regarding how many vacation days each president took are really only measuring the presidents鈥� time away from the White House 鈥� a number that, as far as I can tell, says more about whether a president owns a second home that is easy to secure than it does about his propensity to go on vacation. By the logic underlying media measures of vacation time, Kennedy was taking down time when he was browbeaten by Nikita Khruschev at Vienna in 1961. (Yes, I鈥檓 guilty of repeating those numbers 鈥� see below.) In truth, presidents are almost never on vacation. Sure, golfing with Alonzo Mourning probably represents a form of pure recreation, but as Tony Soprano proved, you can conduct a lot of business even on the golf course.

So, if I vowed not to engage in this debate, why am I writing this post? Because I鈥檓 on vacation and needed an easy writing day. However, rather than repeat myself, I鈥檝e decided simply to repost my last discussion of this issue 鈥� this came out August 19, 2011, under the title 鈥淰acation advice to the president: Avoid the nude beach鈥�:

Matthew Dickinson publishes his Presidential Power blog at http://sites.middlebury.edu/presidentialpower/.