A Round of Goodbyes, One Foreign Leader at a Time

P resident Bush is pulling out all the stops to say a fond farewell to some of his favorite foreign leaders.

Last Monday he treated outgoing Ghanaian President John Ku fuor to a fancy South Lawn arrival ceremony and then a rare state dinner at the White House (only the sixth of his presidency.) On Saturday morning he met with Colombian President Á lvaro Uribe and hosted a social dinner in the evening. Next month, on Columbus Day, he hosts an official dinner for Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (his "amigo," as Bush called him in a recent greeting at the Group of Eight summit).

Bush is not a huge fan of the more formal kinds of socializing presidents do, but he appears to be in a sentimental mood, looking to pay back old friends with invites to the White House and other gestures. He seems to like Kufuor a lot -- he was hosted in Ghana earlier this year -- while Uribe and Berlusconi are ideological soul mates.

The round of goodbyes continues this week. Bush will have meetings in Washington with the presidents of Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority and Afghanistan as well as with the prime minister of India. He will also meet the new president of Pakistan on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, where he will make his final address to the international body.

Bush has typically used his time in New York to have one-on-one meetings with world leaders gathered for the opening of the U.N. session, but he has chosen to have most of those meetings at the White House this time.

Said White House spokesman Gordon D. Johndroe: "It's an opportunity for the president to have many of these leaders down to Washington for the last time."

Keeping Campaign Questions at Bay

When Bush took a few questions from the White House press corps during a Rose Garden appearance with Uribe on Saturday, it was the first time he had done so since a joint press availability with Lee Myung-bak, president of South Korea, in Seoul on Aug. 6. The last time he had a full-blown news conference was July 15. He has done some interviews, such as one last Monday with syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer.

This approach is not particularly unusual for Bush. During the 2004 presidential campaign, he did not do a formal solo news conference from April 13 to Nov. 4, though he did do a few press availabilities with foreign leaders, according to Mark Knoller, CBS Radio's White House correspondent and unofficial keeper of such stats.

The White House says its reticence to put Bush out there in front of reporters is largely motivated by a desire to keep him out of the heated presidential campaign. "If he'd taken questions last week, he surely would have been asked about the lipstick on the pig incident," said press secretary Dana Perino. "We're not going to be pulled into it. This race is between Senator McCain and Senator Obama."

By the time Bush got around to answering questions Saturday, the economy was about to melt down, so that's all the pesky reporters cared about.

A Yale Professor on That Disputed 'Doctrine'

Charlie Gibson's questioning of Sarah Palin about the "Bush doctrine" set off a furious round of blogging in the past week about what exactly the Bush doctrine is. Many liberals said the Bush doctrine refers to one thing and one thing only -- the idea that the United States may act preemptively to prevent an attack on the homeland -- but others said the term has multiple meanings.

Lost in the shuffle was an interesting essay by Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis, a prominent diplomatic historian who is friendly to the White House and has consulted occasionally with the president and his aides. Gaddis posits a different Bush doctrine, drawn from the president's second inaugural address -- namely, that the ultimate U.S. goal is "ending tyranny in our world."