Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.
In Key West, Fla., where chickens and cyclists roam the town with willful lack of ambition, a concrete buoy marks the southernmost point of the contiguous United States. Lopez Island, Wash., in the opposite corner of the country, shares many of the same personality quirks, though with better seafood.
More than 3,500 miles, and a whole lot of U.S. of A., separates the flat keys of Florida from the forested paradise of the San Juan Islands. It's a shame that a modern American president, whether on vacation or on an official Beltway break, will see so little of it. The trappings of the office, and its security and media accessories, have made it all but impossible for a president who is curious enough about the country he governs to soak it up.
What's more, before the age of hyperpartisanship turned summer pastimes into tasteless stunts (see the rodeo clown in a Barack Obama mask egged on by a crowd in Missouri last week), presidents used to be a part of the land's listless days. Now they vacation under a dome filled with like-minded people.
President George W. Bush preferred to spend his downtime in the reddest part of Texas; he took 77 trips to his sun-scorched patch of dirt near Waco during his two terms, and reality rarely intruded. President Obama likes his air on Martha's Vineyard, bluest of provinces, where he's now vacationing for the fourth time since he took office.
A president who can't hear a back-porch fiddler in Tennessee, eat a buffalo burger in the Badlands of South Dakota or check out the truly awful array of yard-art trolls from chain-saw artisans off old Highway 2 is missing more than a story to drag back home.
Certainly, trying something different — say, the Oregon coast for a Republican, the Nebraska State Fair for a Democrat — has its hazards. Sunburned and puffy-eyed, President Bill Clinton looked painfully out of place when he rafted the Snake River during a Wyoming vacation in 1995.
The disastrous transcontinental trek of President Warren G. Harding still looms large. In June of 1923, he set out on a 15,000-mile tour of the big land, called the Voyage of Understanding. A horseback ride caused his hemorrhoids to flare. He got sick on bad seafood. By August, he was dead in a hotel room in San Francisco, fueling conspiracy theories to this day, despite the medical consensus of heart failure.
Presidents should vacation outside their political comfort zones.
The Roosevelts, Teddy and Franklin, may have come from Knickerbocker blue blood, but the founding progressives mixed it up with regular Americans on a regular basis. T. R. hung out with cowboys and roustabouts in Montana, while his distant cousin spent time in the Olympic rain forest in Washington State and felt at home on the dusty Dakota prairie. F.D.R.'s visit to Amarillo, Tex., in 1938 is still remembered as one of the high points of the High Plains.
Those stays beyond the political comfort zone have proven to be productive, as well. Teddy Roosevelt further refined his idea for a "square deal" — a pact with the common man against the titans of monopoly capitalism — after a raucous dinner with miners in the West. An extended train ride along the untamed Columbia River got Franklin Roosevelt wondering about a series of dams that could bring affordable electricity to millions.
Barack Obama is one of the most-traveled presidents in history. He's been everywhere, man — all 50 states, he says, going back to his childhood travels. As a candidate, he even visited the Crow Nation in Montana. But once he became president, flyover country was just that, or worse: a fund-raising stop or a prop for a policy initiative.
Presidents deserve their breaks. The cranks who blast Obama for golfing while Egypt burns could use a badminton swing to the head. World War II did not prevent Franklin Roosevelt from taking his restorative swims in Warm Springs, Ga. — nor should it have.
And no doubt, the drive-by presidency is a byproduct of how cumbersome it has become to take the highest office in the land on an extended stay outside Washington. The Secret Service booked 70 rooms, according to The Vineyard Gazette, for this week's presidential vacation. Dinner at Sweet Life Café, golf at the Mink Meadows Club and browsing time at Bunch of Grapes Bookstore are made possible, in part, by a fleet of Osprey helicopters and cell-on-wheels mobile sites.
But there is so much more beyond the doors of wealthy and well-meaning friends. Later this month, the president plans a two-day bus tour of upstate New York and parts of Pennsylvania. Two days — hardly enough time for any of the late-summer rhythms to sink in. Next year, he should make it two weeks and point that bus toward a cornfield.
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