Inside the bubble

[question everything]

April 25, 2006

Inside the bubble

President Bush, White House press corps detached from the people who live everyday lives across the nation

By J. Patrick Coolican
Las Vegas Sun

As the presidential motorcade moves north on Interstate 15 past the Strip, past the billboards for Danny Gans and the Chippendale dancers, an eerie silence envelops the highway, which is empty, save for the armored Cadillac limousines, the black Secret Service Suburbans, the press buses and vans and the massive police escort.

After the motorcade exits on Spring Mountain Road, it speeds down another empty road, as onlookers watch, past the Fashion Show mall, toward the Venetian. If President Bush looks to his right at just the right moment, about 75 yards away, at the corner of Koval Lane and Sands Avenue, he could glimpse a group of protesters. But only if he looked at just the right moment.

Bush was in town Monday for a fundraiser for Rep. John Porter, R-Nev., and a few hours with the White House press "pool" - the small group of reporters allowed to get closest to Bush - illustrate life inside the "presidential bubble." The unreality of the experience, the surreal isolation, suggests how presidents and sometimes the people who cover them can become detached from the world everyone else inhabits.

(snip)

The motorcade moves from Paradise Road to Interstate 215, to I-15 North, with the Strip on the right. There are no other cars, even on overpasses, although the traffic is jammed up on the on-ramps. Does any president know what it must be like to be sitting on an on-ramp in the beating sun, waiting for him to raise $400,000 for a congressional campaign?

There's an underground garage at the Venetian, and then the ground feels like it's moving, and indeed it is, as the pool hustles from one escalator to the next. If there are real people around, no one knows it, for everyone in the pool is on a cell phone or BlackBerry and rushing to get to the ballroom. Likewise, Bush, in the presidential bubble, interacts only with Republican donors, dignitaries and well-wishers.

(snip)


http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/lv-other/2006/apr/25/566622978.html

[unschooler]

1. Excellent insights. Kudos to the Las Vegas Sun.