Former White House staffer Bill Burton argues that people should “stop complaining about Obama’s golfing.” Bottom line: it’s not really a vacation, even in Hawaii.
Burton makes a good basic point:
I assume you probably agree that human beings function better when they get a little time away. I wouldn’t want my surgeon to be some woman who hasn’t had a break in 4 years. I wouldn’t want to share the road with a truck driver who hasn’t had enough sleep. It doesn’t matter what your occupation is; you will do your job better if you recharge your batteries.
This is as true for presidents as much as anyone, and in the past presidents took substantial, and very real, time off. William Howard Taft spent months at a time (literally) on vacation, while more recently Reagan, Clinton and Bush spent their share of weekends at Camp David or elsewhere.
Indeed, here’s how the total vacation days of some recent presidents (according to interviews with presidential librarians and this Washington Post article) compare:
- George W. Bush: 1020 days (or 879 depending on the source)
- Franklin Roosevelt: 958 days (in 15 years)
- Lyndon Johnson: 484 days (in 6 years)
- Dwight Eisenhower: 456 days
- Ronald Reagan: 335 days (or maybe 349)
- Bill Clinton: 174 days
- Jimmy Carter: 79 days (in 4 years)
Though as Nancy Reagan once said, “Presidents don’t get vacations — they just get a change of scenery.” Burton would concur:
As Washington chews over yet another presidential “vacation,” and that most Washington of words—“optics”—let me take you behind the scenes of the last time President Obama took flack for supposedly being “disengaged” while world events marched on around him….
A small group of us on the staff sat on top of each other for sometimes 20 hours a day in a small secure room inside our hotel. Takeout wrappers and disposable coffee cups would overfill garbage cans until we took them out, since hotel staff were not allowed inside… On daily conference calls that began for us at 2 a.m. Hawaii time, the president’s team began assembling information that would be used to brief the president and the press corps….
I’m not trying to make a woe-is-the-president point – he knew what he was getting into. But it is to illustrate that the president can be, and is, as engaged as is required, even when he is on “vacation.”…
Forget those who say there was too much going on this August: When you have a job that intense, there’s never an ideal time to be off the clock, yet you need to recharge just like everybody else does.
Personally, I look forward to arguments that the president shouldn’t sleep. I mean, if he shouldn’t be taking vacations every few months, what the heck is he doing going to sleep every night?