Contemplating presidential fitness
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.
Even so, there are two areas in which I’ll defend George W. 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 six 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 has long been my suspicion that when reported “cutting brush” on his ranch, Bush is actually inside watching baseball on television 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 may also 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 musclebound.
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 there’s something compulsive about his zeal to keep fit.
No, what’s silly is not understanding that your brain is an organ of your body like any other. A fitter Bush is a smarter, more relaxed and confident Bush than one chained to his Oval Office desk.
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.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a national magazine award winner. You can e-mail Lyons at [email protected].