While this isn’t research specific, I found it worth writing about on a slow day after Christmas. 

I served as Executive Director of the Republican Party of Texas when George W. Bush was elected Governor.  The first time I met the Governor elect was at a luncheon in which we were seated next to each other.  Rather than talk politics, we spent the entire hour or so talking sports.  The Governor knew that I was a University of Oklahoma grad, and he delighted in hazing me over the recent string of OU losses to the University of Texas.  I quickly changed the subject to the Texas Rangers. 

Point is, I found Governor elect and future President to be engaging, intellectual but still the type of regular guy you enjoyed hanging out with.  That’s not the same person most people have seen over the past eight years.

That’s why I found Karl Rove’s column in today’s WSJ to be so interesting.  Karl discusses an ongoing reading contest between he and the President, and details Bush’s reading list going back to 2006.  While Rove regularly wins the contest (one would imagine being President takes up enough time that finding time to read might be challenging), the length of Bush’s list in not unimpressive.

For instance, in the past year the President has read, according to Rove, 40 total books (compared to 51 in 2007 and 95 in 2006) — including David Halberstam’s “The Coldest Winter,” Rick Atkinson’s “Day of Battle,” Hugh Thomas’s “Spanish Civil War,” Stephen W. Sears’s “Gettysburg” and David King’s “Vienna 1814.” There’s also plenty of biography — including U.S. Grant’s “Personal Memoirs”; Jon Meacham’s “American Lion”; James M. McPherson’s “Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief” and Jacobo Timerman’s “Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number.”  Each year, the President also reads the Bible from cover to cover, along with a daily devotional.

Read the entire Rove piece at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123025595706634689.html

Tags: Karl Rove, President Bush, Reading list

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