Bush’s reading belies non-intellectual image

Karl Rove, trying to polish the tarnished image of his former boss, wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal, “In the 35 years I’ve known George W. Bush, he’s always had a book nearby.”

Not only that, but Rove, Bush’s longtime political adviser and former White House deputy chief of staff, has had a reading contest with the president for the last three years.

Rove bragged that he has read more books than Bush each year, but he reports that Bush found time to read 95 books in 2006, 51 books in 2007 and 40 books by Dec. 26, 2008.

At a holiday party, I mentioned Bush’s surprising feat — and was nearly hooted out of the room.

“Must have been comic books!” one person chortled.

“No, picture books!” howled another.

You know a president is held in low esteem when the very idea that he’s a reader is a source of high hilarity.

The commonly held view of Bush as a reluctant reader can be found in an upcoming article in Vanity Fair, “Farewell to All That: An Oral History of the Bush Presidency.”

While silent on Bush’s leisure-reading habits, the long article blasts the president on almost everything else from Inauguration Day 2001 forward.

When the White House released the president’s summer reading list in 2006, it was skeptically received. The president’s “bring it on” persona is as an intellectual lightweight.

Rove insists this is a myth. But he undercuts his own argument with his description of their competitive reading. The contest began when Bush learned that Rove had made a New Year’s resolution to read a book a week in 2006. A few days later, Bush turned the quest into a competition.

Here’s Rove: “We kept track not just of books read, but also the number of pages and later the combined size of each book’s pages – its ‘Total Lateral Area.’”

Surely, someone who cared about the ideas in a book wouldn’t have needed to count the number of pages as a measure of his reading success.

Beyond that, it seems obvious, if gratuitously grumpy to say so at this late date, that the president should have been paying attention to his workday reading. And one wonders where the book buddies found time between Bush’s workouts and his early bedtime for their reading and measuring and counting.

“He plays up being a good ol’ boy from Midland, Texas, but he was a history major at Yale and graduated from Harvard Business School. You don’t make it through either unless you are a reader.”

I’ll leave it to the shrinks and historians to probe why the president chose not to look smart, if that’s what he was doing. 

Still, give Bush his due. He may not have been reading long memos. And he may have been reading as competitive sport. But it was reading.

Reading a book a week — or even 40 books in a year — is more than many of us, myself included, can claim.

Mercer is the Washington bureau chief for Media General News Service.