To Be Fair to Michelle Malkin

Scoring one for post-partisanship, I think Michelle Malkin is right that the media is a lot more positive about Barack Obama's obsessive work-out regime than it was about George Bush's exercise fanaticism. According to Eli Saslow's ridiculously fawning article in the Washington Post:

Obama has gone to the gym, for about 90 minutes a day, for at least 48 days in a row. He always has treated exercise less as recreation than requirement, but his devotion has intensified during the past few months. Between workouts during his Hawaii vacation this week, he was photographed looking like the paradigm of a new kind of presidential fitness, one geared less toward preventing heart attacks than winning swimsuit competitions. The sun glinted off chiseled pectorals sculpted during four weightlifting sessions each week, and a body toned by regular treadmill runs and basketball games.

Compare to this characterization of George Bush by Jonathan Chait (quoted from Malkin):

"The (over)exercise of power." Recounting how President Bush ran 3.5 miles a day and preached more cross-training to a federal judge, Chait fumed, "Am I the only person who finds this disturbing? ... What I mean is the fact that Bush has an obsession with exercise that borders on the creepy."

I'm not all that impressed with Obama's workout routine either. But the exercise situation is different with Obama than it has been with Bush. George Bush was "The Decider," but he didn't seek out information let alone alternative sources of information. Bush also wasn't interested in the details of policy-making, never did much work in the evening, and was in bed by nine. In Bush's case, working out was a central focus of his life as a former alcoholic in the same way as A-A meetings. For Bush, being president seemed to be a distraction from his workout schedule.

At least that's how I remember joking about it.

If anything, Obama is even more of a workout fanatic than Bush. But for Obama, obsessive exercise seems to have become his chosen foothold in "normality" as his life has gotten weirder and weirder over the course of the last two years.

I remember reading about Michael Dukakis keeping his hand in "the normal world" by balancing his checkbook on the presidential campaign plane in 1988. In the same way, it looks like Obama's 7:30am workouts are a way to anchor himself in the normal world before he begins another his ten-hour workdays and evenings "talking to advisers and reading preparatory documents."

Still, 90 minutes a day of weights, cardio, and basketball is a heavy dose of workout narcissism for a president-elect who already gets an enormous amount of adulation. Obama should tone it down.