Kailua (Hawaii):
If there is one thing US President Obama craves during his leisure time, it is privacy.
Mr. Obama arrived on the island of Oahu in the middle of the night as Wednesday turned into Thursday and slipped on a green lei as he descended the steps of Air Force One. Then he sped off in an SUV toward this laid-back residential community on the windward side of the island, far from the bustle of Waikiki Beach, where the bulk of his travelling White House stays, in Honolulu, the city he lived in as a boy.
Then, the most visible man in America promptly dropped out of sight.
Mr. Obama's disappearance behind the palm trees reveals much about his presidential style, and also his thinking about how to balance work and play. He tends to separate the two, as much as any president can. Other presidents, especially those who owned secluded homes or vacation retreats, often mixed them, using their homes outside Washington as tools of the presidency - another means of advancing their goals and agendas.
Mr. Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, dangled invitations to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, as perks to favored foreign leaders. Lyndon B. Johnson often hosted members of Congress at his Texas ranch. Theodore Roosevelt turned Sagamore Hill, his home in Oyster Bay, NY, into the "Summer White House"; he invited diplomats from Russia and Japan there to begin talks to end war between their nations, thus earning for himself the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize.
Mr. Obama has a home in Chicago but no vacation place; he stays here in a luxury beachfront rental. Yet even if he did have his own hideaway, there is little indication that he would turn it into an extension of his White House. He rarely goes to Camp David, the presidential retreat in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland, and when he does, it is not to conduct business. After Democrats took a drubbing in the mid-term elections, though, Mr. Obama hinted that may change; he said he intended to meet with leaders of both parties more frequently, "including at Camp David."
This surprised even allies, some of whom think Mr. Obama could use his free time to greater political effect. "It's a great idea," said Tom Daschle, the former Senate Democratic leader, who recalled spending time with President Bill Clinton at Camp David. "It's a setting that is quieter and slower and a perfect environment for relationship building."
Yet Mr. Obama is not a politician who uses circumstances and relationships to cajole. He is not one to say, "Let's have a couple of drinks and hash this out." He does not confuse his work friends with his real friends. He jealously guards his time with his wife and daughters and the tight circle of intimates like Eric Whitaker and Martin Nesbitt from Chicago, who are with him here. And he is perfectly content to leave his public persona at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and slip, however briefly, into private life.
"Hawaii is a place that is extraordinarily special to him, so being able to come here and spend time with his family is something that really recharges him," said Bill Burton, Mr. Obama's deputy press secretary, who is here as well. "Even something as simple as getting into the ocean is really important to him. The goal is to spend as much time with his family and his friends as he possibly can."
That is not to say Mr. Obama is not working. He receives his daily intelligence and economic briefings as usual, and on Thursday he called President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia to talk about Senate ratification of the New Start arms pact. But he has no public events scheduled and managed to duck television cameras, despite the networks' best efforts, when he left his compound to play golf.
"I think it speaks volumes about the man's temperament," said Robert Dallek, the presidential historian. "He doesn't crave the spotlight the way some of these other presidents have. They needed to be constantly in the eye of the public; it propelled them into politics in the first place. Obama is less that way; he is more of a self-contained person, someone who can genuinely spend time by himself with his family."
He is not the first. Ronald Reagan played host to the queen of England at his mountaintop ranch in Santa Barbara, California, but he rarely invited members of his own cabinet there. He regarded it as "his and Nancy's special place," said Kenneth M. Duberstein, his former chief of staff, and he resented the photographers with their long lenses who angled for a shot of him on horseback.
"It bothered Reagan that he couldn't just go off camera for a while," Mr. Duberstein said.
Of course, the urge to seclude oneself can get a president in trouble, as Mr. Obama discovered last year when the authorities thwarted an effort by a Nigerian man to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day. The president did not emerge to address the nation until two days later - a serious public relations blunder. By that time, his homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, had drawn ridicule for saying "the system worked," and it was up to Mr. Obama to repair the damage.
Mr. Duberstein says, "There is no such thing as seclusion and the president in the same sentence." But here in Kailua, Mr. Obama can come close. The place oozes "live and let live." Boys with tousled, sun-bleached hair tuck surfboards under their arms as they skateboard home from the beach.
At Island Snow, Mr. Obama's favorite shave-ice shop, where the flavors include koolau lychee and maunawili mango, all the locals knew precisely where he stays. But as Dawn Horn, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who lives here, said, "Hawaiians' perspective is that we like to let our visitors, especially if they are well known, have some space."
Governor Neil Abercrombie, who knew Mr. Obama's parents when they were students in Honolulu, says that what the president finds here is not so much privacy but "acceptability" - the protective cocoon that comes with being in the warm embrace of a familiar place, where people regard him as "ohana," Hawaiian for "extended family."
"He's not living in isolation; he's living in the middle of the Kailua neighborhood," the governor said. "So what I mean by acceptability, rather than privacy, is that everybody accepts that concept of ohana and family, and that it extends to him, most especially to him. We consider him a
keiki o ka aina, a child of the land."