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"That's the whining pool," he says, pointing to the nearly finished swimming pool, which was built as an inducement to his teenage daughters. "If you whine loudly enough, you get a pool." He continues, stopping at the porch outside the living room. "As you walk around the house, you can take advantage of the different vistas." Many of the 19 wooden chairs being stored in the garage will be placed here for the guests who come nearly every weekend. A 10-acre man-made pond built and stocked with 5,000 bass has also been designed around the oak trees, and one oak sits at the tip of a little peninsula. The view looks like a national park, and Bush, the grounds keeper in chief, leaves no detail unsmoothed. He tells of how irked he was by a dead tree's breaking the water's surface, how he took off in his bass-fishing boat, a gift from his uncle William T. Bush, wielding a chainsaw. "I was out there in Uncle Buck's bass-fishing buggy, and the wind was blowing from the north, and I was standing there, nearly got blown over," he remembers. The mission was unsuccessful.
Until the construction is completed, the First Family is staying in the property's original cottage. The sage exterior color is repeated inside, where the rooms are plain. The front door opens into a sitting room with a folk-art three-dimensional rendering of the White House jutting out from the back wall. Its thick, bulky columns look as if they're made of toilet-paper cardboard. Other walls have a few touches of humor: a framed likeness of President Bush dressed as an oil sheik greets you as you walk out of the bathroom, and a set of three Chinese revolutionary posters exalt Chairman Mao. The bookshelves are in the dining room, packed with baseball tomes, novels (including non-Republican writers like Gore Vidal and Nora Ephron) and some histories. There are two televisions, one with rabbit ears. There's no cable, but the CIA did install a secure phone recently.
When we reach the kitchen, lunch is already out on the center counter. "What is it you tracked in here?" says Bush to Spot, the spaniel who has left prints all over the dark hardwood floor of the kitchen. He moves quickly for the heart-shaped mop to clean up the mess while Laura slices the tomatoes for lunch. Our host doesn't check in with Austin or Tallahassee. Gore could easily have taken the lead in the hand count by now, but Bush doesn't look distracted. The meal is simple: tuna salad with eggs, sliced tomatoes and a vegetable tortilla soup. The Governor needs more fuel for his cedar chopping later in the day, so he fixes himself one of his favorite sandwiches, peanut butter and honey. But no soup for him. He says he doesn't like it. At the worn maroon dining table, the conversation changes from the landscape of his ranch to that of his possible new presidential future. He is more curious about things than he appears in public, and talk ranges from Chad (in Africa) to the kind of rampant sucking up that White House staff members engage in when you're President. He has seen from his father's days how people censor themselves once they cross that Oval Office threshold, squashing their formerly strong opinions. When he talks politics, he focuses less on ideology than on the particular power relationships, individual motivations and how they can be used to get things accomplished. The meal ends with chocolate-chip cookies and milk.