It's 10 O'Clock. Do You Know Where Your President Is? In Bed. [View All]

[kskiska]

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON

On Sunday night President Bush spent two hours watching a gala at Ford's Theater. On Wednesday he will spend an hour at a St. Patrick's Day lunch on Capitol Hill. On Tuesday he will spend something less than an hour with the prime minister of the Netherlands. And, of course, he will spend an hour each day in exercise.

Americans might surmise from at least some of these activities that the president of the United States has time to burn. That was certainly the point last week of Senator John Kerry, who slammed Mr. Bush for spending as much time with cows in Houston as the president had allotted for his testimony to the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.

"If the president of the United States can find time to go to a rodeo, he can find the time to do more than one hour in front of a commission that is investigating what happened to America's intelligence," said Mr. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

The White House response was that Mr. Bush would answer all the commission's questions, and that he might go over the hour allotted. "Nobody's watching the clock," Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said on Tuesday.

But on Sunday, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, fired a warning shot at the commission on behalf of her boss. "I would hope that they would recognize that he's president, and people would be judicious in the use of his time," she said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Underneath the political back-and-forth is a more substantive campaign issue that illuminates the nature of a presidency: How does the leader of the free world use his most precious commodity, time?

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/15/politics/15LETT.html