Under fire in Washington over Iraq, President Bush headed South Wednesday to push his health care proposals and sounded like a man glad to be out of the U.S. capital.
“I’m tired of the politics just like you’re tired of the politics,” Bush told a health care round-table discussion, saying he wanted to work with lawmakers to find “common ground on common-sense ideas to solve common problems.”
Bush’s short visit to Chattanooga, a scenic city on the bank of the Tennessee River, had its lighter moments, showing a remarkably loose president even as he faces an uproar in Congress over his deployment of 21,500 more U.S. troops to Iraq.
At Erlanger Hospital, when Bush was shown graphic videotape of surgery being performed by a doctor operating robotic arms, Dr. Donald Chamberlain asked Bush if he was feeling queasy from seeing the blood.
“Are you OK with this?” the doctor asked.
“Heck yeah, I’m OK with this. How about you, Doc?” was Bush’s reply.
At the Chattanooga Convention Center, Bush told Amy Childers, a Nashville interior designer who does not have health insurance, that she did not look a day over 34 when she told him she was 35.
“Most people say 22, but thanks,” replied Childers to which Bush indicated that his gaffe would not hurt his political career.
“I’m not running again,” he said.
Winding up at Porker’s Bar-B-Que for lunch, Bush shook hands with surprised diners and hugged 35-year-old waitress Becky Roden, who shook with excitement and said she was going to get him some food.
“Go get it, I’m starved,” he told her.
Bush’s upbeat mood was in spite of low public approval numbers and in contrast to that of many Democratic lawmakers in Washington, who are trying to determine how far to take a battle over the president’s plan to spend $100 billion to fund wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Since Democrats took command of Congress in November elections, Bush has talked up the need to work with the new majority after benefiting from Republican rule of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
