resident Bush has built a thick wall of privacy around his 19-year-old twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara, the spirited twosome who made tabloid headlines last spring for under-age drinking. These days, the White House has taken a vow of silence about anything to do with the twins.
The president does not extend the same courtesy to his less publicity-prone dogs, a 13-year-old English springer spaniel named Spot and a 1 1/2-year-old Scottish terrier named Barney.
Mr. Bush has begun to talk so much about his dogs and their idiosyncrasies lately that they have become a regular part of his political patter around the country. Jenna and Barbara are never mentioned, but Spot and Barney get whole paragraphs of reverie. Recent listeners to Mr. Bush might be excused for thinking that the president had no daughters at all, only dogs.
"The family's doing well," Mr. Bush said not long ago in Little Rock, Ark., a sure sign that he was about to begin a dog anecdote. "Barney the dog is in great shape. Spot, the dog who was born in the White House when Mother and Dad were there, is getting a little up in the years, but she's doing well, too. She's used to the confines of the South Lawn. And I invite her every morning into the Oval Office to start my day." Spot, the president continued, "makes herself comfortable on the new carpet." (Pause) "That's why Barney's not invited in the morning."
The crowd laughed, as it always does.
But the president reached new heights of canine digression not quite two weeks ago at a political fund-raiser in Kansas City, Mo., where he revealed his special feelings about Barney. Mr. Bush first called him "a fabulous little guy," then referred to him as "the son I never had." Armchair psychologists can chew on that for a while, but the crowd let out a big laugh.
The president's comment only underscored what has been obvious to many of his predecessors: White House dogs are terrific for humanizing the image of a chief executive. That has been the case from Franklin D. Roosevelt's Fala (also a Scottish terrier) to Bill Clinton's Buddy, the chocolate Labrador retriever who met a premature end on a Chappaqua, N.Y., road last spring. (On Father's Day, Mr. Clinton got a new chocolate lab, Seamus.)
But Mr. Bush's dogs also bring a taste of ordinary rhythm to his life in the White House. The president says that a favorite pastime is taking Spot and Barney out on the grass for their morning walks. Later in the day, he sometimes whacks tennis balls for the pair from the top of the driveway onto the South Lawn. Tourists staring through the far-off fence probably don't recognize the solitary figure playing fetch in the distance as the president of the United States.
Mr. Bush, whose daughters are away at college, admitted recently after a trip to Latin America that he had worried how the dogs were doing back at the White House without him.
"I thought a couple of times during that trip about the pets," Mr. Bush told CBS News. "I wanted to make sure they were happy and didn't miss us."
Like Mr. Bush, Spot and Barney have good pedigrees. Spot was part of the White House litter born to Millie, "author" of the best-selling "Millie's Book" (1990), which was "dictated to" the first lady Barbara Bush. "I often sit in on morning briefings," said a caption that accompanied a picture of Millie in the Oval Office with, among others, Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser.
Millie's expertise extended beyond book-writing, in the view of the first President Bush, who said of Mr. Clinton and Al Gore during the 1992 presidential campaign, "My dog Millie knows more about foreign policy than these two bozos."
Barney, no also-ran as a blue blood, was a gift to the Bushes from Christie Whitman, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and the former governor of New Jersey, who grew up in the Garden State's fox-hunting country. Barney's mother is Mrs. Whitman's Scottish terrier, Coors, and his father has the euphonious, evocative name Kelly of Champion Motherwell Stormwarning.
Such lineage is distinctively more East Coast than Texas, a reminder of Mr. Bush's patrician roots. But the dogs always accompany the president and his wife, Laura, to their 1,600-acre spread in Crawford, Tex., where experts say the dog of choice on a typical working ranch is a Border collie or an Australian shepherd, both of which are suited for rounding up cattle. Terriers like Barney are more traditionally farm dogs. "If they were going back to their historical roots, they might actually go to the president's barn and catch rats," said Laurie Telfair, a founder of the North Central Texas Herding Dog Association.
Back at the White House, only Spot is included in high-level meetings. "Sometimes during Oval Office meetings," a senior administration official said, "she does what some of the staff is inclined to do, which is to go to sleep."
