Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch…

President Bush is back home for a month, tooling around in his pickup truck, fishing in his pond and cutting brush in the canyons of his 1,600-acre ranch.

But Mr. Bush takes pains to point out that he has not left the presidency behind, just temporarily changed the location.

"I've moved my office to Crawford," he told a political luncheon audience in Jackson, Miss., on Wednesday as he raised $1 million for the GOP and its candidates.

But looking around the room at the hundreds of well-dressed diners, he said he did not have time to linger.

"I'm not going to stay for lunch; I'm going to head on home," Mr. Bush said. "I look forward to spending some time outside the nation's capital."

As Dwight D. Eisenhower did for his golfing outings a half-century ago, Mr. Bush and his staff are calling the president's second annual August respite in Texas a "working vacation."

To make the point, White House officials say the president will have visited 15 cities by the time he returns to Washington after Labor Day.

Mr. Bush's public schedule lists no events for the next several days. On Aug. 13, he hosts an economic meeting at Baylor University in Waco at which Cabinet members will lead discussions on such issues as corporate responsibility, the economy, retirement security and health care.

Also next week he plans to visit the Iowa State Fair and to address a political fund-raising event in Wisconsin.