Judging from Amity Shlaes’s book, Coolidge, presidents of the early Twentieth Century vacationed by means of a Summer White House.  To be sure, technology then wasn’t as it is now, so a mobile base of operations was an elaborate undertaking that would lend itself to such thinking.

Much of the trip wasn’t a vacation so much as working in a different place, and even the leisure activities were meant to serve a diplomatic function.  In South Dakota, for example, President Coolidge’s visit was meant, on his part, as a means of understanding the people of the region (and their similarities) and, on the part  of South Dakotans, as a means of showing off their state to the president and to the country.

Consequently, when the Associated Press comes to the defense of President Obama at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century, saying that “President Obama has spent less time away from the White House” than his predecessors, one gets the sense that the point is being missed.  The news media of Coolidge’s day reported how many fish he caught and speculated about his displeasure when his wife got lost in a stroll through the woods.  That is, “how is the president faring in an unfamiliar region of our country?”

In Matthew Continetti’s telling, it’s as if Obama has inverted everything.  The fact that he’s away from the White House is mainly immaterial, because President Obama seems to be disengaged and living it up no matter where he is:

For this president, the distinction between “time off” and “time on” is meaningless. For this president, every day is a vacation. And has been for some time. He is like Cosmo Kramer of Seinfeld. “His whole life is a fantasy camp,” George Costanza says of his friend. “People should plunk down $2,000 to live like him for a week.” Imagine what they would pay to live like Obama.

In her AP article, Darlene Superville notes that President Bush had spent more “partial or complete days” at his ranch in Crawford, plus 26 at the Bush family estate in Kennebunkport, Maine.  That may have lacked the diplomatic investment of a South Dakota excursion, but it still gives more the sense of a second White House than yet another circuit of golf, beach, dining out, and concerts on the Vineyard.