Inside the bubble

By J. Patrick Coolican

Tuesday, April 25, 2006 | 7:05 a.m.

As the presidential motorcade moves north on Interstate 15 past the Strip, past the billboards for Danny Gans and the Chippendale dancers, an eerie silence envelops the highway, which is empty, save for the armored Cadillac limousines, the black Secret Service Suburbans, the press buses and vans and the massive police escort.

After the motorcade exits on Spring Mountain Road, it speeds down another empty road, as onlookers watch, past the Fashion Show mall, toward the Venetian. If President Bush looks to his right at just the right moment, about 75 yards away, at the corner of Koval Lane and Sands Avenue, he could glimpse a group of protesters.

But only if he looked at just the right moment.

Bush was in town Monday for a fundraiser for Rep. John Porter, R-Nev., and a few hours with the White House press "pool" - the small group of reporters allowed to get closest to Bush - illustrate life inside the "presidential bubble." The unreality of the experience, the surreal isolation, suggests how presidents and sometimes the people who cover them can become detached from the world everyone else inhabits.

The machinery of a presidential visit is massive, involving hundreds of people - Secret Service and local law enforcement, White House press office and advance teams. Calls went out Sunday with instructions for reporters and photographers who would make up the local pool of journalists traveling inside the bubble.

Monday at 10:30 a.m., at a central meeting point near a cargo terminal off Russell Road, bomb sniffers are busy - even checking under the hoods of police cars.

Dark suits and guys with earpieces are everywhere.

A White House advance team volunteer, who refuses to provide her name, gives instructions. She's wearing shoes with a leopard skin design and a Vegasy, revealing top, which seems odd for this White House.

"Local pool," she calls out.

After bags and equipment are searched and reporters and photographers are checked for weapons, they are hustled onto a small bus and driven across the bleached tarmac.

This follows another pattern of a presidential visit - hustle somewhere just to stand around and wait.

On the back of a flatbed semi, near where the president's plane will taxi to a stop from its flight from John Wayne Airport in Orange County, Calif., TV crews set up equipment while TV reporters apply makeup.

Bush walks out to the edge of the stairs, smiles and waves. At the bottom of the stairs, he reaches into his pocket, takes out a little jewelry box and gives a President's Volunteer Service Award to Patty Murphy, a volunteer nurse who worked on a cruise ship near Mobile, Ala., for Hurricane Katrina evacuees in September.

Photographers grumble that the scene makes a bad image, with the backdrop provided by an airplane engine; Republicans cite these scenes lately when griping about the White House press operation.

Bush takes no questions.

He shakes a few hands with Republican dignitaries, and then, the call goes out, "Local pool - to the vans! Quickly! Quickly!"

The motorcade moves from Paradise Road to Interstate 215, to I-15 North, with the Strip on the right.

There are no other cars, even on overpasses, although the traffic is jammed up on the on-ramps. Does any president know what it must be like to be sitting on an on-ramp in the beating sun, waiting for him to raise $400,000 for a congressional campaign?

There's an underground garage at the Venetian, and then the ground feels like it's moving, and indeed it is, as the pool hustles from one escalator to the next. If there are real people around, no one knows it, for everyone in the pool is on a cell phone or BlackBerry and rushing to get to the ballroom.

Likewise, Bush, in the presidential bubble, interacts only with Republican donors, dignitaries and well-wishers.

The press pool is cordoned off from the people who have paid $500 to $2,100 for the right to be at the lunch.

"Bus, plane, motorcade - you're following whatever move he makes," says Dave Catrett, a cameraman for CNN. "It can be real exciting and real boring."

As the color guard from a junior ROTC group makes its presentation, print reporters tap away at their keyboards, winning no friends from the crowd. A woman sings the national anthem in a smoky, husky voice fitting for Las Vegas.

Catrett says being in the Washington press corps has changed since he started at CNN eight years ago and got into broadcast journalism 20 years ago.

"In the briefings and the presidential news conferences, I'm always thinking, 'Where's the follow-up? Where's the follow-up?' " Reporters are too concerned about access, worried about angering an important politician, he says.

"When I came into this business, people weren't afraid to insult somebody in power," he says.

Porter comes to the stage and introduces Bush, mentioning his tax cuts, the strong Nevada economy and the new prescription drug benefit for Medicare recipients. He doesn't mention the war in Iraq, which has become a drag on Republican fortunes nationwide.

Bush speaks for 20 minutes, his speech familiar to anyone who's seen him during the last few years. Iraq is the central front in the war on terror ... freedom is universal ... make the tax cuts permanent. For the sake of local Republicans, he leaves out any talk about the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.

Bush often sets up his opponents, making them seem naive.

"There are some that kind of feel like maybe these folks," he says, referring to the terrorists, "are just kind of angry citizens of the world who occasionally lash out. No, these folks are bound by a common ideology. They're totalitarian in nature. They've usurped a great religion to justify their acts of murder."

The crowd applauds, but it feels less than the ecstatic adulations of campaigns past. Bush's approval ratings are now in the low 30s nationally, high 30s here. If there's any indication Bush feels the sting of his recent slide, it comes in this passage describing Porter, who Bush says "doesn't play that Washington, D.C., game of empty rhetoric and harsh talk and severe condemnation."

He finishes speaking and begins to work the rope-line.

"Local pool! Quickly! Quickly!"

The pool is jogging, a few in high heels, from one escalator to the next, a mad dash to get to the motorcade before Bush is finished shaking hands and signing autographs.

Back on the tarmac, Air Force One waits for the trip back to Washington. Bush climbs into the belly of the steel beast. The national press pool hustles onto the back of the plane, wishing they could have spent a night in Las Vegas, they said.

They can't, though, because the machine moves on. The next event awaits.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.