Bush Suggests Journalists Run for Their Lives : The media: He chides ‘lazy guys.’ Testiness apparently started with repeated questions about taxes.

Forget about broccoli. President Bush is on another kick: whipping the White House press corps into shape. Or perhaps, just whipping it, at least verbally.

In two encounters with reporters in the last two days, Bush has demonstrated a certain testiness, beneath a teasing tone. On Friday, he appeared irked over repeated questions about whether the federal budget deficit would force him to seek a tax increase. On Saturday, that edginess continued, leaving the impression that, although the topic of the moment was physical exercise, the President may have had in mind the previous encounter on the fiscal exercise.

Bush went for a morning run Saturday and tried to talk a group of perhaps a dozen reporters, photographers and television technicians trailing along to the track into joining in the exercise.

He found only one taker--Rita Beamish of the Associated Press, who accepted only reluctantly after being invited several times by the President.

Completing the run (13 laps around a football field in 25 minutes and 25 seconds) with Beamish, a marathoner, the 65-year-old President cooled down and called out: “The rest of you lazy guys get out there and run.”

Invoking the name of the muscular chairman of his Council on Physical Fitness, Bush lectured:

“Arnold Schwarzenegger and I would like this message to go out: A fit America is a fine America. A fit America is a strong America. A fit America should include photo dogs as well as print reporters who slovenly sit back in the stands while some of us are out running.

“Any questions on that one point? Nothing to do about taxes. I’m talking about fitness,” he said, his specificity serving to warn away any attempt to drag him into a discussion of taxes and the budget deficit.

“That’s a pretty taxing proposal, Mr. President,” a reporter replied.

“Never mind, sir. I think you’re trying to lead me into the mire,” the President shot back, avoiding a topic of considerably greater presidential sensitivity and controversy than fitness.

Turning his attention to the exercise needs of television sound technicians who carry microphones on long poles, known as “booms,” he said:

“Boom men, those who ruin antiques in the Oval Office--it would give you more strength in the forearms to keep those microphones up in the air.”

As for the scattered protests that his exhortations prompted, he dismissed them curtly: “You can’t take it,” the President said.