Air Force One Boarding Now!

Pardon me for asking, but how come President Bush was taking Air Force One around the country to make appearances all over the country in an effort to help his fellow Republicans campaign? This bugged me so much that I did some snooping on the internet and found out that there are of course rules about what portion of a trip is political and which part is public business. However, there are many ways to interpret the purpose of our President's trips, leaving us, the tax payer to pay the real cost of the trip. Here is a good article concerning just that very subject on the Federal News Radio web site (www.federalnewsradio.com)Air Force

One Flies Into Center Of House Campaign (Oct 20th,2006)

When President Bush announced his trip to Savannah, Georgia, last month to stump and raise money for former Republican Representative Max Burns' effort to oust Democratic Representative John Barrow, Barrow did his best to put a damper on the festivities.
Bush was not visiting to discuss port security or illegal immigration or even the minimum wage, Barrow said in an e-mail bulletin to area voters. Instead, Barrow claimed, Bush was coming to Savannah just to headline a fundraiser for Burns and that taxpayers would get stuck with the bill.
Burns' campaign was billed for the trip, under a twenty-year-old formula used by the White House to apportion how much of the trip was public business and how much political.
In keeping with his practice of including stopovers on campaign expeditions, Bush first flew to Atlanta to give a speech on terrorism before traveling on to Savannah.
The tab for the part of the trip devoted to the Burns campaign stop was forty thousand dollars, which he paid to the Republican National Committee.
His aides consider the matter closed. But the real cost of the visit was probably upwards of four hundred thousand dollars.
According to a Government Accountability Study, the White House reimbursement formula forces political campaigns to pay only a small fraction of the travel expenses.
The National Taxpayers Union has called for political candidates to at least pay the operating costs of Air Force One, which average about fifty-seven thousand dollars an hour.
Link to this Article
http://www.federalnewsradio.com/index.php?nid=262&sid=949345