Travelin’ man

The Republican National Committee was criticizing President Barack Obama for going to New York City over the weekend with his wife Michelle for dinner and a Broadway play.  Political analyst Charlie Cook found it somewhat hypocritical for the GOP to be knocking Obama when the president’s amount of personal travel doesn’t even come close to the number of trips taken by his predecessor.

Cook writes in his weekly column for National Journal —

I don’t recall the RNC taking a position on former President George W. Bush’s 77

trips to Crawford, Texas, covering all or part of 490 days — whenever you see

these kinds of numbers, you know they come from CBS Radio’s Mark Knoller, the

semiofficial keeper of all White House statistics — while Bush was in office.

Or for that matter, the 11 trips to Kennebunkport, Maine, which covered another

43 days. For those slow at math, that’s 533 days out of 2,920 in office. And

those were generally flights on the 747 version of Air Force One, not the three

much smaller, and less expensive, Gulfstream jets used to ferry the first

couple, staff, security and press on this past weekend’s trip.