Bush on the road

For most people who telecommute, or work from home … oh, never mind. On to the numbers. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, responding to reader questions at the New York Times

… Mark Knoller, the CBS News radio correspondent, who has covered the White House since 1976, keeps meticulous records and is a veritable encyclopedia of presidential facts and figures, which he freely shares with colleagues. The Bush administration takes issue with his statistics, because he counts partial days as days away, but here are his latest figures, as of Tuesday, Nov. 11:

Crawford ranch: 76 visits totaling all or part of 483 days
Camp David: 132 visits totaling all or part of 461 days
Kennebunkport: 11 visits totaling all or part of 43 days.

By Mark’s calculations, the president has been at one of these three locations for all or part of 987 days, and has been in office for 2920 days. That’s 33.8 percent.

To be fair, we should note that Stolberg offers some excuse on the president’s behalf. After all, “the president is the president wherever he is”. And that’s true, even when golfing in the middle of a crisis.