One thing the shooting had done was to totally screw up my plans to campaign for Republican candidates during the last part of the 2006 mid-term elections. Marilyn and the doctors wouldn’t even let me get out of the White House until the beginning of October, which only left me about five weeks to help out. On the plus side, I had pretty good approval ratings. The Kurdish War had been fairly successful, and had boosted me to the low 80s. I had dropped as soon as it was over, and people understood some of the budget problems it had caused, but getting shot had boosted me back to the low 70s. (Nothing like almost getting killed to make you popular. Try it sometime and find out!)
Still, I managed a campaign swing every weekend through the remainder of the election season. I would fly into a town on Friday night, meet the Congressman or candidate, and give a speech and attend a fundraiser. Saturday morning I would travel to a nearby district and repeat the process through lunch, and then on to another district in the evening. Maybe I would try to help a Senator in a tight race. Sunday we might fly someplace else, and repeat the process, and then fly home Sunday night, late. It was really quite exhausting, and by the end of the season I was worn down to a nub. I had lost at least ten pounds during my hospital stay, had only regained some of it after I got out, and then lost another ten during the election. I needed a vacation. I told my staff that I intended to lay low over the winter and build up my strength and stamina.
Unfortunately, as President, you really don’t get a vacation. Never mind the fact that everybody and their brother is constantly coming to you so that you can fix their problems. No, the biggest issue is that it is politically a really bad idea to take a vacation if you are the President. People want to know who the hell he thinks he is, taking time off at government expense, to fuck around! It doesn’t matter that the expense is come out of my pocket. I am obviously goofing off on their tax dollars! I need to stay in Washington, at my desk in the Oval Office, working 24 hours a day, and I should pay the government back for the time I wasted going to the bathroom!
There were actually reporters who counted the days you took off and reported them, and not to your benefit. One report, which actually made it onto MSNBC, showed that I had spent 107 days in 2005 on vacation. When Will Brucis told me that, everybody on the staff was completely mystified. The best that anybody could figure out was that they were counting any day that I was not physically present in Washington for a complete 24 hours as a vacation day. In other words, if I took Marine One to Hereford on Friday night, and then flew back at the crack of dawn on Monday morning, that counted as four days of vacation. Even that didn’t account for everything, so we were rather confused. Will tried to get the network to detail what days they were counting, but they refused, citing freedom of the press. Fox and CNN, in a pleasant little bout of commercial rivalry, looked at the travel logs and came up with a vastly lower number, on the order of about 20 that year, including a week at Hougomont, another week in the backyard in Hereford, and four days in Ireland following the G-8 summit in Scotland. MSNBC never retracted their story, but they did stop pushing it.
The Irish vacation was actually one of the better ones we took. We were staying at a very nice and very private hunting lodge in County Cork, not that either Marilyn or I ever hunted. No press was invited or allowed on the grounds, but the day we left the G-8 summit some reporter asked what we planned to do. My first thoughts were to say something rude and unprintable, and Marilyn knew it, so she laughed and wagged her finger at me, telling me to behave. Instead I laughed and made a joke about doing quality control inspections of Irish distilleries. Some smart fellow over at John Jameson must have heard the interview, because the next day, right after we woke up, one of our Secret Service agents asked us about our plan to visit the John Jameson distillery in Cork. Marilyn and I gave him confused looks, and he told us the invitation had come in that morning, and then chided us on changing the schedule without their knowledge. I promised Marilyn I would take her on a tour of a rum distillery if she went along with this, and we did a distillery tour. I did quality control checks on I don’t remember how many different samples, and got pleasantly snockered with some of the John Jameson execs, and then took several cases back home of some very select whiskies that don’t make it to the stores. Good trip!
Since I had become President, I had only been to Hougomont four times. It is just politically lousy to be known for owning an ‘estate’ or a ‘vacation resort’ in a foreign country. It hadn’t been sitting empty, however, because I used it frequently to give staffers a nice vacation, and Congressmen and Senators (and their staffers) could be reliably counted upon to be bribed with a nice vacation there as well. It pays to be wealthy. In 2007, during the winter Congressional recess, I planned to make a ‘national security inspection’ into a vacation. We had some big military bases in Guam and I was told it had some lovely beaches. Marilyn and I decided to find out.
The election results on the morning of November 8 turned out to be pretty much the same thing we had on the morning of November 7. The Democrats had a thin majority in the Senate and the Republicans had a slender but significant lead in the House. All that had been accomplished by the expenditure of several billion dollars was that they rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic. The real winners were the lobbyists on K Street. The real political discussion from here on out was going to be the 2008 Presidential race, and the fact that I was now a ‘lame duck’ and unable to accomplish much more during my time in office.
Well, screw that! I had maybe one more year of being able to accomplish anything in this town. 2007 was going to be the last year anything would get done. 2008 was going to be an election year, and a big one. It was time for a new President, and the Democrats would be all over it, and even with my backing and the incumbency of the Vice Presidency, John McCain was going to face a primary challenge. If I wanted to do anything, it would have to be in the next 12–14 months.
Certain things were going to pretty much handle themselves. We had won Kurdistan, and the next few years there would be some consolidation. By reacting to the chemical warfare, but not invading Iraq, we had shown a lot of ‘moral leadership’ around the world and in the Middle East. Winning the peace was going to be a slog, and expensive, but straightforward. Come to terms with the new Iraqi leaders, keep the peace going between the Turks and the Kurds, and try not to get too big for our britches. I knew there would be calls that we use our military strength to face down Iran and make them behave. That would simply be disastrous. We had a military that was second to none in killing people and breaking shit, and generally worthless when it came to keeping the peace or nation building.
The Kurds did authorize a standing military force and basing rights, which the Pentagon eagerly dropped on my desk. They had plans to station a couple of heavy armored brigades and a fighter wing there. I shot that down as being too big and expensive. They grumbled, but I did sign off on a composite brigade and some military infrastructure projects. Tom Ridge told me that was actually what they wanted all along. The composite brigade would combine a heavy armored battalion, a Stryker battalion, and an airmobile infantry battalion, along with some engineering and logistical support elements. In command of this composite brigade was one freshly minted Brigadier General Buford, now sporting a nice and shiny Distinguished Service Medal (which is not the same thing as the DSC, which is a combat medal) for coming up with the ops plan for Kurdish Dragon. He was young for the rank, and I suspected he was a rising star. We also coughed up some cash to do some infrastructure upgrades at Incirlik, with the Turks. Depending on circumstances, I could see making one more Middle Eastern trip before I was out of office, to touch bases with the Kurds, Turks, Arabs, and Israelis.