Critic to Bush: Get a horse
   by Gene Lyons

Having voted in my last junior high student council election long ago,
I am normally unmoved by suggestions that this column adopt a more upbeat
perspective regarding President Bush. I can think of no good reason
either to feign school spirit or pretend enthusiasm for the administration’s
manifest failures, foreign and domestic. Friends in Austin, Texas, assure me
that Bush can be disarmingly personable. So can every other confidence man
who ever ran a successful swindle.

I enjoy reminding FOX News devotees who have adopted the Soviet practice of
diagnosing Dear Leader’s critics with psychiatric disorders that no man alive
exudes more personal charm than the Arkansas antichrist, William Jefferson
Clinton. Even so, there are two areas in which I’ll defend Bush to the end:
his love of baseball and his passion for physical exercise. The president
recently underwent his annual physical exam at the National Naval Medical
Center. Doctors not only couldn’t find anything wrong with him, they
pronounced him in "superior" physical condition for a 59-year-old man.
At "nearly 6 feet" and 191 pounds, Bush has a resting pulse rate in the
high 40s and a body fat percentage of 15.79, the last two numbers
equivalent to a professional athlete’s.

Having buggered up his knees through years of jogging, Bush has become
a mountain bike enthusiast whose occasional tumbles are widely reported.
He also works out on an inclined treadmill and lifts free weights.

Learning about Bush’s treadmill work suggests the solution to a small mystery.
It’s long been my suspicion that when reported to be "cutting brush" on his ranch,
Bush is actually inside watching baseball on TV in air-conditioned comfort.
I figure Karl Rove invented the brush-clearing angle to make Bush resemble
Ronald Reagan, a well-known horseman and chopper of firewood. As the
president’s equestrian skills are limited to golf carts, a manly outdoor
activity was required.

Jogging was famously a Clintonian exercise, so that wouldn’t suffice, while
bicycle riding brings swarms of Spandex-garbed, latte-sipping yuppies to mind.
Thus, brush cutting.

Trouble is, nobody in Texas cuts brush by hand, not even illegal Mexican
ranch hands. They drag it out of the ground with big chains or chop it up
with a bush hog, an oversized rotary mower pulled by a tractor. So I
figure Bush is actually working out on a treadmill in front of a giant plasma
TV screen. I imagine he’s invested the necessary pittance to buy the MLB
package from his satellite provider, allowing him to ignore the hapless Texas
Rangers in favor of any game (or games) he chooses. He’d be a fool not to.

According to Jonathan Chait in the Los Angeles Times, Bush can bench-press
185 pounds six times, which also may explain the president’s exaggerated
swagger. He’s evidently not, as detractors have suggested, imitating an
adolescent chimpanzee trying to look bigger, but may simply have gotten
a bit muscle-bound.

Well, good for him. Chait, however, doesn’t see it that way. Normally a
writer of eminent good sense, he thinks Bush spends too much time
exercising. Busy people like himself, Chait says, simply can’t spare an
hour or two a day to work out. So how can the president? Complaining
that "Bush has an obsession with exercise that borders on the creepy,"
he suggests that there’s something compulsive about Bush’s zeal to keep fit.

Chait guesses that the president associates a lack of physical discipline
"with his younger, boozehound days," and believes it absurd to suggest,
as White House spokesmen have, that exercise keeps him mentally sharp. 

"The notion of a connection between physical and mental potency," Chait writes,
"is, of course, silly. (Consider all the perfectly toned airheads in Hollywood
—or, perhaps, the president himself.)"

No, what’s silly is not understanding that your brain is an organ of your body
like any other. Nobody’s suggesting that working out can turn a George W. Bush
into a Thomas Jefferson, the latter an exercise advocate who rode horses daily
even after he was too old to mount unassisted. But a fitter Bush is a smarter,
more relaxed and confident Bush than one chained to his Oval Office desk
maxing out on adrenaline and stress. The time Bush spends working out greatly
increases his stamina and allows him to stay alert longer than workaholics who
chain their flabby carcasses to their desks in the mistaken belief that they’re
indispensable. If I’d been Bush’s personal trainer, I’d have advised him to lose
the cowboy boots 25 years ago before high heels wrecked his knees. Today I’d
urge him to invest in a couple of dead-broke quarter horse geldings and use that
ranch of his the way God intended. If he’d like a private referral, I can normally
be reached during Cubs or Red Sox games pumping iron or pedaling
compulsively on my Schwinn Airdyne.