Bush Hits Pain Threshold by Feeling People’s Woes

News report, Dec. 23, 2002

President Bush showed no ill effects from his smallpox vaccination, taking a morning jog at Camp David before going to church. Bush is feeling “absolutely, positively fine,” said White House spokesman Adam Levine. Experts estimate 15 out of every 1 million people vaccinated for the first time will face life-threatening complications, and one or two will die.

Now this is great! This is statesmanship -- leading by example! But why stop at the mere prick of a needle? Kings and statesmen have always gone out slumming among their people incognito for what we’d now call a reality check -- and a PR bonanza. King Alfred, so the story goes, got smacked in the head by some 9th century housewife after he was supposed to be watching her cakes cook but instead began daydreaming about chasing the Danes out of his kingdom, and he let the cakes burn. Shakespeare’s King Henry V went among his troops in disguise and nearly brawled with a soldier who ragged on the king’s reasons for going to war.

Bill Clinton used to say he felt our pain (when he took time out from feeling something else), but that’s touchy-feely talk. A real president doesn’t just feel our pain, he shares it. President Bush -- you got that smallpox shot. Now get down with the people!

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News report, Labor Day 2003

President Bush today began practicing his pledge that he and his family will live for six months on unemployment checks only, like so many Americans caught in an economic bind. “I want to let the American people know that I understand what it’s like. My motto is, no special treatment.” He will still live on his Waco-area ranch for security purposes, and sources said the president took the precaution of sewing a couple of $20s and Dick Cheney’s black American Express card number into the soles of his cowboy boots for emergencies.

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News report, Oct. 3, 2003

President Bush, who has been patronizing the nation’s fast-food burger eateries while subsisting on unemployment checks, today came down with symptoms of an E. coli infection. First Lady Laura Bush drove him to the nearest hospital, part of the nation’s biggest for-profit hospital chain, founded by the family of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. The hospital refused to admit the president because he is technically unemployed during his six-month experiment and has no health insurance. Doctors sent him home with aspirin and Kaopectate.

Mrs. Bush argued unsuccessfully with the admissions office that because the chain, HCA Inc., had recently paid $631 million to settle allegations of health-care fraud involving false claims and kickbacks on Medicare and Medicaid, it owed the nation “a gesture of good faith, and how better to restore that faith than by treating the president in his time of need?” Potentially deadly E. coli bacteria have been found in meat and poultry plants. A draft report by congressional investigators last year noted that U.S. meat plants that failed government food safety guidelines nonetheless sold meat to consumers, in spite of Bush administration assurances that the plants would be shut.

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News report, Oct. 17, 2003

President Bush, driving his sport utility vehicle to a job interview as part of his “sharing America’s pain” effort, was today involved in a minor traffic accident that left him uninjured. Highway patrol investigators said the driver of a Mexican truck bringing avocados into the U.S. under new and controversial NAFTA regulations got confused on a freeway interchange, braked suddenly and struck the president’s SUV near its fuel tank.

Investigators said the accident could have been worse had the president been driving with a full gas tank, but Bush joked with them that he could only afford $5 worth of fuel at a time, giving him a range of about 60 miles with current SUV fuel efficiency standards. By the time the president finally arrived for the interview for an assembly-line job building interceptor missiles for his own new “missile shield” program, the jobs had been withdrawn.

The firm, whose CEO is a friend of the Bush family’s, unexpectedly decided to move the jobs to its Indonesian assembly plant.

Last week, First Lady Laura Bush returned to work at a nearby public library to help pay the bills while the president is technically out of work. On her second day on the job, she was fired after she defied as “inappropriate and un-American” requests from her husband’s Homeland Security investigators, refusing to give them a list of library patrons who had checked out the children’s book “Magid Fasts for Ramadan.”

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News report, Nov. 27, 2003

President Bush spent Thanksgiving with family and friends, chowing down on the first White House turkey not to receive a presidential pardon.

The president, continuing his commitment to subsist on unemployment benefits, said he felt bad having to take an ax to the turkey, and would pardon two turkeys next year. But, he explained, he couldn’t afford to “commute the main course,” because “store-bought” turkey was too expensive, and by the time he heard about a food bank turkey giveaway, and got to the food bank aboard the No. 18 bus -- which broke down en route -- they’d run out of free turkeys.

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News report, Dec. 25, 2003

President Bush returned unexpectedly to the White House aboard Air Force One today, cutting short by about two months his experiment in living on the margins of the nation’s economy.

In a possibly related move, Karl Rove, architect of much of Bush’s political philosophy, was seen being escorted by security from the White House grounds, carrying his personal belongings in a cardboard box.

White House advisors were summoned to a rare Christmas Day summit. One, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the meeting was short, and that Bush’s mystifying one-sentence statement to them was quoting a line from the old “Pogo” comic strip: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

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Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.