Tales from the Trail

When George W. Bush says he’s done with politics — believe it.

Not even the queen of daytime TV could draw the former Republican president into commenting on the current political scene when Bush sat down with her to discuss his new book.

He makes it clear he has moved on from politics and that punditry is not his thing.

“I’m through with politics. It’s hard for people to believe. I already said that. I am through. I enjoyed it,” Bush says in excerpts of an upcoming interview with Oprah Winfrey released Thursday.

Winfrey asks if that’s why he’s made no public comment on  President Barack Obama’s  job performance.

“No. Because I want to treat my successor the way I’d like to have been treated.  I don’t think it’s good for a former president to be out there opining on every darned issue. He’s got a plenty tough job. Trust me. And there’s gonna be plenty of critics and he doesn’t need me criticizing him. And I don’t think it’s good for the presidency. Other people have a different point of view,” Bush explains.

First came celebrity endorsements from Oprah and Arianna. Now Jon Stewart’s Washington “Rally to Restore Sanity” has a more puzzling promoter.

Here’s a clue: German summer pants for little William? (10 letters) 

Stumped? The answer is ”Will Shortz“. He’s editor of the New York Times crossword puzzle, which today devotes no fewer than eight clues to the Daily Show host, his fellow satirist Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Report and the joint rally they’re planning for Saturday on the National Mall.

For anyone flummoxed by the clues to 54 and 65 Across, Colbert’s version of the event is called the “March to Keep Fear Alive.”

President Barack Obama is giving himself  “a good solid B+” from his job performance thus far and is brushing off polls showing his approval rating has dropped below 50 percent.

Obama was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey in a show that was broadcast on ABC on Sunday and the queen of daytime TV wanted to know how Obama would grade himself. Obama said he deserved a B+, which in the U.S. education system, is very good but not up to an excellent A.

He said he reached his conclusion because of the many challenges he had tackled and that if he gets a healthcare bill he can say, his grade would inflate to an A-.

First lady Michelle Obama’s favorite childhood Christmas present was a dollhouse, a gift that may have presaged her current role as  the nation’s tastemaker, admired and followed for her stylish clothing and the mark she is making on the White House.

“It was a metal dollhouse with plastic furniture,” she told U.S. talk show host Oprah Winfrey for her upcoming “Christmas at the White House” television special that  airs on ABC at 10 p.m. Sunday.  “… I remember I really didn’t know how to set up a house, so I had all the furniture lined up along the walls as opposed to nestled around the fireplace, but I loved that little dollhouse.”

President Barack Obama’s favorite present? A basketball given by his father, who was absent for most of his childhood, and which the president later realized probably had a lot to do with his lifelong love for the sport.

She’s everywhere.

We can think of no other losing vice presidential candidate who has captured so much media coverage a year AFTER losing the bid for the White House.

The Palin phenomenon perseveres (this week anyway).

The Washington Post has TWO columnists writing about her today — Eugene Robinson’s “Our Evita,” and Richard Cohen “Time for some Palintology.”

The front page of the Post showcases a quote from Sarah Palin’s book “Going Rogue” which is out in bookstores today: “I always remind people from outside our state that there’s plenty of room for all Alaska’s animals — right next to the mashed potatoes.”

Is she running for president? Seeking a coffee summit with Hillary Clinton? Or just selling her book?

The only clear answer about Sarah Palin’s intentions is that the questions are drawing lots and lots of U.S. media attention. 
  
This week, the former Republican vice presidential candidate and Alaska governor is on the cover of Newsweek magazine. She’s also going on-air for separate interviews with TV’s Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters of ABC News.
    
It’s all about promoting her new memoir, “Going Rogue: An American Life,” which goes on sale Tuesday. But the notion that she also might be testing the waters for a 2012 presidential run is what’s drawing the serious attention.
    
Supporters liken her to a populist 21st century Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater. But not all the coverage is as she’d like it.
    
Newsweek, which pictures her on its cover as an attractive young woman in running shorts, scoffs at the idea of a Palin 2012 presidential campaign.
    
“Her brand of take-no-prisoners partisanship is not good for the Republicans in the long run and not good for the country,” Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham told MSNBC.
    
“When you have a kind of ‘death panel’ ideology, where you make pronouncements that are factually untenable and tend to inflame the conversation … that’s not good for governance.”
 
She got a warmer reception from another woman of the campaign trail, former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, whom Palin thinks she might like to meet over coffee.
 
“I absolutely would look forward to having coffee. I’ve never met her. And I think it would be, you know, very interesting to sit down and talk with her,” Clinton, now U.S. secretary of state, said over the weekend.
    
But the last word is likely to be Palin’s. Her book promotion is expected to draw huge crowds across the country. And while a Washington Post/ABC News poll shows that 60 percent of Americans don’t think she’s qualified to be president, a similar percentage of Republicans say she is.
  

Photo Credits: Reuters/Nathaniel Wilder (Palin); Reuters/Jason Reed (White House); Reuters/Jonathan Ernst (Clinton)

Apparently all is forgiven.

Sarah Palin tells Oprah Winfrey she wants to welcome Levi Johnston back into the fold.

Her daughter’s ex-fiance and father of her grandchild has been all over TV shows and in print media making unflattering comments about Palin, but the former Alaska governor says he’s part of the family.

Palin, who ran for vice president on the Republican ticket with Senator John McCain last year, also had nice things to say about Oprah, who had supported the other party’s candidate — Barack Obama.

OK, so President Barack Obama’s lightning jaunt to Copenhagen last week was less than successful. Even with Oprah along, the Cheerleader-in-Chief couldn’t clinch the deal for Chicago to host the 2016 Olympics. It happens.

But now that he knows the way to Denmark, might the American president consider arguing the U.S. case at international climate meetings in Copenhagen in December? The White House said he might, if other heads of state showed up.

“Right now you’ve got a meeting that’s set up for a level not at the head of state level,” presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters on Air Force One last week. “If it got switched, we would certainly look at coming.”

President Obama deeply disappointed his hometown Chicago when he announced that he would not go to Copenhagen next month to personally make the city’s case for hosting the 2016 Olympics, so he and first lady Michelle Obama, who is going in his stead, on Wednesday brought the Olympics to the White House instead.

Former Olympic and paralympic athletes, Chicago officials and local schoolchildren attended the event on the White House lawn, where the president and first lady both spoke and watched judo and gymnastic demonstrations. The president even joined in with some of the athletes, earning a gentle jibe from his wife.

“You should have seen the president in there fencing,” she said. “It was pathetic, but he passed the baton really well.”

CHICAGO – Oprah Winfrey has introduced her talk-show audience to the mystery man on whose shoulder she wept during President-elect Barack Obama‘s election night victory speech. 

 ”I only saw the back of his head,” Winfrey said of her teary moment caught by TV cameras and flashed repeatedly around the world as she rested her head on the shoulder of a man standing in front of her in a sea of people. 

 At the taping of Friday’s show in her Chicago studio, Winfrey brought the man  – former Reuters reporter Sam Perry — up from the audience for a face-to-face hug.