Apparently, George Bush carries nothing in his pockets. I understand why — aides handle his phones; he never needs identification; he doesn’t need to pay for anything — but I never actually thought about it before. I’m sure Bush is no different in this regard than any prior president. It still seems sort of surreal.
I’m pretty sure if I was president, I’d still carry stuff. Maybe not money or ID or credit cards, but definitely my own pen, a pocketknife, Carmex, and maybe a small notebook or Palm. Or maybe not; maybe it’s just too liberating to go without — or too easy to make aides carry all your crap.
Weird.
(It occurs to me that this is really just another manifestation of something his father famously took heat for: being wholly unaware of the existence of supermarket bar-code scanners. Why would G. H. W. Bush have ever seen such a thing? He’d been president for a few years at the time, and his prior job was 8 years as Ronnie’s veep, which takes us right back to the 1970s. Still, how weird would it be to be that disconnected from the everyday life of everyone else?)