If It’s Saturday, It Must Be Jackson Hole

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. —  For a stay-at-home kind of guy, President Bush isn’t spending a lot of time at home.

Since leaving the White House at sunrise Friday, he has spoken to cattle ranchers in Denver, sat among U.S. athletes at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City and then settled in for a 36-hour stay in the Grand Teton mountains.

He returns to Washington late this afternoon only to turn around Monday morning and fly to Wisconsin. And at week’s end, he’ll be back aboard Air Force One for a one-week trip to Japan, South Korea and China.

Bush was famous during the 2000 presidential campaign for his insistence that he return home to sleep in his own bed in Austin, Texas, at every opportunity. Now that he lives at the White House, he is spending little time there. He has been on the road, or at Camp David or his ranch in Crawford, Texas, for all or part of 29 days this year. In fact, during the first 39 days of the year, he had touched down in 20 states. Last year, he was almost as peripatetic, reaching 37 states.

Much of the travel this year has been work-related, and much of that has been tied to the budget. He has embarked on an aggressive campaign to highlight elements of his spending plan. On Tuesday, for example, he went to a medical center in Pittsburgh to dramatize his request for a more than 300% increase in spending to combat bioterrorism.

Many of the states he has visited went to Al Gore in the 2000 election, but their vote tallies were close enough to put them up for grabs in 2004. Likewise, many others favored with a presidential visit were states that went for Bush, but by such a close margin that the White House is not taking any chances.

Swing states traditionally attract presidential attention, and Bush is no exception, already visiting Pennsylvania (Gore won with 51%) and Ohio (Bush won with barely 50%). Bush, who lost California by nearly 12%, virtually ignored the state in his 2001 travels, but it was the first state he visited on a post-New Year’s Day trip from his ranch--perhaps a sign that political aides think he has a chance there in 2004.

Famous Florida? He already has been there twice this year. Ditto West Virginia, a state most political analysts thought Gore should have won but which gave 52% of its votes to Bush.

Where hasn’t the president gone? Just a year in office, he has missed only nine states, and only one of them, Washington, is usually up for grabs in a presidential election.

Not counting a weekend visit in July to his parents’ summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine, Bush had not, until this weekend, spent any time at what others might consider a vacation resort.

(He appears to consider his ranch in Central Texas just that. It does, after all, afford him the bragging rights to daily jogs in temperatures topping 100 degrees. But Crawford has yet to make it into standard travel guides as a resort destination.)

He and Laura Bush arrived here at 11 p.m. Friday, past the president’s preferred bedtime.

“A little late for us,” he said grumpily as he walked down the steps of the Boeing 757 that served as Air Force One for a storm-tossed flight over the mountains and into a small airport in Grand Teton National Park.

The Bushes stayed at a home about 150 feet off a two-lane road, built in a pine forest in a subdivision of five-acre lots. His host was Roland Betts, a fraternity brother at Yale University. Bush was the frat president, a party animal of the first degree, by his own accounts, and Betts was the rush chairman. Since then, Betts, a New Yorker, has been at Bush’s side--or perhaps more accurately, a step ahead--helping him buy a managing partnership in the Texas Rangers major league baseball team and planting financial seeds for Bush’s political undertakings.

The president is not a skier; indeed, he is not known for savoring any winter sports.

White House aides considered arranging a photo session of the president venturing out on snowshoes Saturday but scrapped the idea after consulting him. He remained out of sight for the day.

Just the decision-making on that small matter suggested the pace Bush was following here. The question was not broached with him until after his daily national security briefing. In Washington, that occurs around 7 a.m. On Saturday, it apparently did not take place until around 9 a.m.

The president’s choice of a weekend in Jackson Hole seemed peculiar for him. To be sure, it is spectacular, and even for a man from the flatlands of Texas, it would not be hard to feel a Heidi-like appreciation of the mountains.

The Grand Tetons frame the town, and a fresh drop Friday added about 5 inches to snow that is already waist-deep along some roads. The region attracts the likes of Vice President Dick Cheney, a Wyomingite who has a house here (but was not here this weekend), and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, whose hunting camp is nearby--perhaps 90 miles away, but not far by local standards.

The temperature was 25 degrees when the president arrived--a break from the minus 11 registered earlier in the week. The high was 24 degrees Saturday afternoon, and even with eye-squinting sunshine reflecting off the snow, the Chamber of Commerce would call it brisk.

The president makes no bones about not caring for the winter weather.

Indeed, he is so averse to it that he fended off Russian President Vladimir V. Putin’s invitation in November to visit Moscow and St. Petersburg in the heart of the winter. But he replied that he would love to visit.

That would put him on the road again. Perhaps in May.