Mark Shields, nationally known columnist and commentator, is the moderator of CNN's The Capital Gang

Mark Shields: Presidential vacations -- the Gipper's example

WASHINGTON (Creators Syndicate, Inc.) -- As master of the timeless national ritual of the presidential vacation, Ronald Reagan was truly without peer. Of course, the presidential vacation -- like the Women's Christian Temperance Union, which advocated total abstinence from alcohol, not temperance -- is not what its name suggests.

Historically, the presidential vacation is a lot more presidential than it is vacation. The president's schedule bulges with briefings, meetings and important visitors, so that the rest of us can sleep confident that the president is very much in control. Many presidential visitors wear dark blazers or suits to underline the gravity of the meetings. A president can be all business in an open-necked work shirt.

President Reagan refused to play that game. When the Gipper went to his beloved ranch outside Santa Barbara, California, he was on vacation. Photos were not provided of the president poring over eyes-only briefing books. He refused to wear the established chief- executive frown, which signaled the terrible, lonely burden a president must bear. After clearing brush from the ranch's trails, Reagan regularly cut enough firewood to threaten the international timber cartel.

President George W. Bush's affection for his ranch on the broiling Texas plains is clearly as genuine as was Reagan's for his mountain spread on the California coast. Before leaving Washington for a summer trip to Crawford, he once confided to Republican senators that "the national media will hate it, but I'm going to where it's 98 degrees average day and night."

That's fair. Waco, the nearest "big city," which has never been confused with charming Santa Barbara and is home to the Dr. Pepper museum, was once described by conservative thinker Marshall Wittman -- who grew up there -- as "one tall building surrounded by 100,000 Baptists." Still by all indications, Bush thrives working and running in his ranch's August heat and is content to spend extended time there with his wife.

But George W. Bush -- whose own parents still spend summers at the family compound on the Atlantic in fashionable Kennebunkport, Maine, and who, as the son, grandson, nephew and cousin of dozens of Yale graduates, lived in New Haven with a group of roommates who were his prep-school classmates at exclusive Andover -- is somehow trying to pass as an anti-East Coast, good old boy populist. How else to explain these August 10 presidential words to The Associated Press's Scott Lindlaw, to whom Bush gave a personal tour of the ranch? "Most Americans don't sit in Martha's Vineyard, swilling white wine."

This sounds an awful lot like the politics of resentment, which Republicans regularly condemn. True, Bush's Oval Office predecessor, Bill Clinton, did favor summer vacations on toney Martha's Vineyard, where he dined, sailed and golfed with the Rich and the Famous. True also that Clinton is the only president we know who actually decided how and where his family would vacation -- hiking and camping in Wyoming -- after being told by his then-guru Dick Morris that those were the activities prized by swing voters.

But let us, as a distinguished Republican president used to say, be perfectly clear: Kennebunkport is free of the urban grittiness of either East St. Louis, Illinois, or Camden, New Jersey. Per capita white wine consumption there may even rival that on The Vineyard or Nantucket. If it becomes the popular conclusion that George W. Bush, himself a confirmed non-tippler, is writing off politically all those American voters who have an occasional glass of white wine, then somebody please put presidential political strategist Karl Rove under suicide watch.

Ronald Reagan single-handedly threatened one of our most enduring status symbols of the chronically Self-Important: the "working vacation."

We do not make automobiles or movies in Washington. We have difficulty measuring in tangible units exactly what we do produce. Often, when we cannot measure our precise output, we instead measure our input -- the time in hours we are in the office or at the desk. And if someone is truly serious about her work and that work is truly serious, the illogic goes, she must wear a pained, troubled facial expression.

The Gipper refused to complain about the pressures of his office. He enjoyed being president. For the professional martyrs, he smiled too much. With one wonderful line, he routed the joyless critics who had faulted his 9-to-5 White House hours: "It's true that hard work never killed anybody, but I figured, why take the chance?" He had it right.