It's not all about him.

While watching President Bush's press conference, I was struck again by a couple of characteristics of his public speeches:

1. He uses the word "I" an awful lot. While it's good to know that he puts himself in the middle of the discussions and actions, rather than pointing to an amorphous government, it seems that he's personalized it too much. It's as though he's trying to convince us (or himself) that he is important, relevant.
   
2. He uses the phrase "hard work" an awful lot. "It's hard work." "This is hard work." It's not even used as an excuse, but as a statement that he is, in fact, working hard.
   

I don't care to psychoanalyze him too much, but this sounds like an employee pleading to a boss. "I worked hard on this TPS report. It may not look like much, but I worked hard. You've got to give me credit for that." It can also sound like a son who is trying to prove himself to his father. "I worked on this really hard."

And, while it should surprise no one that he would avoid answering difficult questions, I think that the President took it to a new level. His response to a question regarding Michael Chertoff's "gut" feeling about a terrorist attack this summer wandered further than Omar the Tentmaker riding a drunken camel.

One final thing. He was asked how it was that we wound up so ill-prepared for the post-Saddam challenges, he first said that he had asked Gen. Tommy Franks and others on the Joint Chiefs if they had sufficient soldiers and materiel. They all responded in the affirmative. We have since learned that they were gravely wrong. So, now, the President exhorts to trust the commanders in the field to tell us what's going on in Iraq and when it will be safe to leave. "Trust, but verify," Ronald Reagan used to say.