Dubya made Estes Park a stop on his "Home to the Heartland Tour." Didn't you feel His Density's gravitational pull? An equally folksy title for President Bush's month-long "working vacation" could have been "Take This Job and Shove it." Basically, Bush hates Washington D.C. He prefers his ranch in Crawford, Texas, a cultural vacuum situated 16 miles outside of Waco. Crystal stemware ain't got nothin' on Crystal Gale.

Crawford, Dubya's treeless home on the range. Where the assault rifle-toting religious fanatics shoot antelope at play. Where seldom is heard a multisyllabic word and the sky rains ultraviolet radiation all day. Crawford, Texas: Dubya's vision for America. Population 600.

Between puttering on his golf course and hooking bass gasping for death's sweet release from his murky artificial fishin' hole, Bush made it to Colorado. Occasional puddle jumps to places like the Y.M.C.A. of the Rockies make up for the fact that he is taking more time off than the average European working stiff.

In downtown Estes Park, I drove past a coalition of protesters cordoned off inside a "First Amendment Zone," leaving me to wonder what zone I was in. Nearing the site of the presidential visit, the road developed clots of sheriff's department cruisers.

The men and women who surround the President today never blew off a pep rally in high school. The Tracy Flicks would announce yet another stretch of highway adopted by Key Club. During the speech, members of the ROTC color guard stood erect, fantasizing about taking a bullet for Tracy. Hopefully a flesh wound, and not in the crotch. The White House staff are all straight 'A's, and they are all plugged with discreet earpieces. Female presidential staff are all Type A personalities, women who dazzle you with immaculate, discomfiting smiles. They are the backbones of heads of state and corporations everywhere. Exemplifying these career girls is the brilliant Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security advisor, who enrolled at Denver University at 15 and became a Stanford professor at 26. Chevron named a supertanker after Rice. She has body-checked Boris Yeltsin. Then you have the alpha males of the Secret Service, who smile never and pack lovingly customized Austrian firearms. Within the immediate vicinity of the president, I noticed that security morphed from oafish sheriff's deputies who got their badges by default, after dropping out of trucking school, to purebred Doberman samurai who scanned and sniffed the crowd, ears perked, muscles taut.

The traveling White House press corps are the elite, The Journalistic Shit. If that title wasn't next to the NBC or CNN on their laminates, I could read it in their body language. While many of the local reporters had a furtive, shambling aspect to their demeanor, these people oozed confidence. The top network videocameramen smoked, swaggered and swore a lot. They were pissed about their positioning at the event's scenic overlook and they let a press secretary have it.

"Could you get the White House staff, please!" one cameraman said.

The woman tried to respond. "Just do what we say," said another camera guy, dragging on a cigarette as the woman walked off unnerved. "Our little escort doesn't know what she's doing."

I am a member of the Acne press corps. We are kids with no experience, hobbled by tons of delusion and pristine, top-of-the-line camera equipment purchased by our parents. We do stupid shit that we pick up from textbooks and movies.

I saw Karl Rove, chief White House strategist, college drop-out and self-taught Machiavellian mastermind behind the Bush II box office smash, chatting with four senior White House journalists about a big issue of the day. I walked up and stood behind the huddle. I felt like I had an audience with a Pope, back in the days when they ordered wars instead of pooh-poohing them. I had a microcassette recorder and notepad in hand. Rove noticed this. "Man," Rove said, indicating my recorder, "You're making me nervous." I made a show of stowing the device, which hadn't been on, in my pocket. The other reporters occasionally jotted notes, and while I was certainly poaching their gravitas, I didn't care. When I scribbled, Rove got ticked. "You gotta play by the rules or I'll have these guys beat you up," said Rove-- jokingly, I think-- indicating the other reporters, who remained mute at the confrontation. The correspondents' wrath didn't concern me so much as being attended to by Secret Service. Those fellows could probably ram my larynx through my brain stem, and make it look like they were just giving me directions to the Port-o-John. That's what happened to Sam Donaldson. I hustled back to my seat.

Oh yeah, at the center of these concentric rings of steely professional resolve and skill was George W. Bush. He ate some barbecue brisket. Then he said stuff. Dubya knows...

Partisan politics: "You can disagree in an agreeable way."

Quasi-religious social services: "We ought to welcome the faith-based programs that help define our country as a unique land."

Parks management: "[A] wise and common sense approach to how we thin out our forests." Okay, okay, "... to prevent the hazards of forest fires."

The president's visit to the Y.M.C.A. at the edge of the Rocky Mountain National Park served two purposes. Despite the Village People, Bushies are boffo for organizations like the Young Men's Christian Association. Faith-based enterprises free up taxes for missile shields; that's right, in the Navy. In the Air Force, too. And since Bush worked momentarily on a Colorado nature trail, we'll forgive him for letting Paul Bunyan build an oil derrick out of fresh-cut timber.

I, too, want to disagree in an agreeable way. In the spirit of civility, as embodied by our president, I will offer an inspiring quote, by ... Mr. something something. "I may not agree with what you say, but defending..." No, wait, got that wrong. "I defend my way..." Ah hell, how 'bout them Aggies?

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