28 August,2011 08:24 AM IST | | Rupert Cornwell / The Independent / The Interview People
Hold the front page. Barack Obama has embarked on a 10-day summer holiday on Martha's Vineyard, the upmarket resort island just south of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. After the most gruelling and dispiriting spell of his presidency, who could possibly begrudge him a week and a half off? As it turns out, just about everybody.
Chill, Mr President: Barack Obama attends to a stressful work call at the
White House in May. pic/AFP
At one level, in a country that spends more time at work than practically anywhere else in the industrial world, the fuss reflects a peculiarly American unease at the idea of a proper "get away from it all" holiday. But a President can never get away from it all. The world doesn't stop because its most powerful inhabitant is trying to get a bit of R&R. Like many of his compatriots, the President takes his job with him. For them, that means a BlackBerry on the beach. For him, it's a mini-White House on the move.
Even on holiday, the US President never escapes the White House press pool. A spokesman gives daily briefings ufffd slacks and an open-neck shirt their main concession to the less formal circumstances. Key White House advisers are never far away, nor is the famous briefcase with the nuclear weapons code.
And presidential holidays have a way of being disturbed. George HW Bush was fishing in Maine when the abortive Soviet coup was staged in August 1991. Fourteen years later, his son was at his ranch in Texas when Hurricane Katrina struck, and George W never recovered from his tardy and lethargic response to the catastrophe. Presidential holidays can be dangerously distracting things.
But above all, the furore is political, and never more so than now, when the opposing party's presidential candidates are cranking up their campaigns, the economy is teetering on the edge of a new recession, and ordinary Americans are worried not about their holidays, but about their jobs ufffd that is, assuming they are fortunate enough to have jobs.
Even some Democrats are worried that Obama is sending the wrong message by his choice of destination. For his foes, it is a case of the pampered emperor fiddling while Rome burns, and last week the Republican National Committee even opened a website, ObamaGetAway.com, on which you can choose from a selection of postcards depicting the 44th President at play. "Wish you happy job-hunting from sunny Martha's Vineyard," reads the message on one.
This sort of criticism, it should be said, is as old as the republic. Back in 1799, the second president, John Adams, was savaged for spending months at his home in Quincy, Massachusetts, even though he had solid excuses: his beloved wife Abigail was extremely ill, and in those days summer-time Washington was a malarial swamp. But it's got much worse in the modern era ufffd and Democrats seem to bear the brunt of it.
Paradoxically, that may be because they tend to be less rich. The big holiday-takers among recent presidents have been the Republicans, none more so than Bush the son, who by this stage of his presidency had spent 181 days, or six months, at his ranch. But the Vineyard is another matter. For some reason, Democrats love the place. Clinton hated holidays but spent a week there during his first years in office.
And if it makes Obama happy, so much the better. The American presidency is arguably the most nerve-racking and generally impossible job on earth. Surely the man deserves a decent break?
