SORRY, I'VE GOT TO ARRANGE MY SOCK DRAWER THAT WEEKEND

The more I think about this story, the more upset I get. President Bush slights NATO and Turkey so that he can attend his daughters' graduation ceremonies. Here's a section of the WaPo story again:

Things seemed pretty set a few months ago for the NATO summit meeting next spring in Istanbul -- the first in Turkey since 1957. After much consultation, meeting dates were sketched in for a couple of days at the end of May.

These summits are huge undertakings, with leaders from more than 40 countries -- NATO members, the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council and other organizations -- and thousands of people showing up. Planning to accommodate so many people and events usually takes more than a year. The Turks, who have but one suitable venue for such an extravaganza, started planning immediately.

President Bush, as leader of the free world, is naturally the indispensable star at these gatherings. And this would be part of a very busy diplomatic spring for him. In addition to the summit, he has the 60th anniversary of D-Day in France on June 6 (wouldn't do to be out-patriotic-ed by Ronald Reagan from the 40th), then two days later the G-8 economic summit in Atlanta.

But the White House discovered a huge problem. Seems the proposed NATO dates conflicted with the graduations of the Bush daughters from college in Texas and Connecticut. So the administration has informed the rest of NATO that they would have to change their schedule or Bush wouldn't come.

OK, so part of the reason that I'm upset is that I can start ticking off the important family events I've missed in the past few months because of work obligations, such as an art opening that my sister had in Boston and my mom's graduation from Divinity School. I suppose I could have asked my class to reschedule and quashed my own sense that I would be cheating the good taxpayers of New York (in addition to my students) who are paying me to teach the next generation whatever it is that I have to teach. But I was always taught that sometimes your familial obligations have to give way to broader concerns, especially when you have been charged with doing a job well.

This sense of priorities on the part of Bush should destroy any pretentions that this President has to being a "multilateral" actor. "I'm sorry, ye other leaders of the world's most important military alliance: I've got to show my daughters that I love them. Reschedule or I can't be at this historic meeting in Turkey. That's the way this White House operates: you're on my personal schedule, or you can forget it."

And even if Bush doesn't want to present himself as concerned first with his family and then with the rest of the world, people in the rest of the world are going to read it this way. Here are some of the German-language headlines: "Family takes priority over world politics" (tagesschau), "NATO summit is postponed because of Bush's daughters" (Kleine Zeitung, Austria), "Private life more important than NATO" (Focus, Germany).

We should call this what it is, namely, imperial arrogance and a shirking of official duties for private reasons. Grounds enough for calling into question President Bush's leadership, I'd say.

Remember way back in the early days of the Clinton administration when the President caused flights at LAX to be delayed as President Clinton got an expensive haircut while Air Force One sat on the tarmac? At least that was only LAX. Here we're talking about what are arguably our most important allies.

And the "liberal media" is, of course, all over this one.

Or not.

MORE: It's worth articulating further what precisely is wrong with this kind of decision on the part of the President, if the story is accurate. It is hard to imagine other wartime presidents acting in the same fashion. Would Lincoln or FDR wreak havoc with our most important military alliance for family obligations? If we really are in wartime -- and if the President is going to ask members of the armed forces, including the national guard, not only to sacrifice their family lives but their lives as a whole -- then the President should act like a real Commander-in-Chief and put his international obligations first. What sort of a message does this kind of behavior send to the troops?

MORE: Jim at Outside the Beltway responds here, noting that his daughters' graduations are a "pretty good cause" and "there's really not that much done at the head of state level at these things, anyway." I'm not saying that graduations aren't important, or that NATO meetings are the center of the diplomatic universe. Heck, I'd love to have gone to my mom's graduation last spring. It's just that I would have had a hard time justifying ditching my classes (where some might contend "not much is done" on any given day, although I would dispute that!) for the trip. Moreover, I'm not the President and Commander-in-Chief, but Bush is. Perhaps when all you're doing with your life is running the Texas Rangers, or holding some cushy corporate job, you can ditch important yearly meetings, but when you're elected to do the people's business, and you claim that it is wartime and sacrifices need to be made, it is selfish and un-leaderly to refuse to make those same kinds of sacrifices.

Steven at Poliblogger argues that there will be no "domestic fallout":

One thing that strikes me is that this is the kind of thing that is likely to make Bush detractors quite angry and cause Bush supporters to largely yawn.

Yes, I'm a Bush detractor. I also think that if you're a Bush supporter, you have to admit that putting a higher priority on you daughters' graduation over our most significant military alliance (and a meeting at which one could have solidified relationships with Turkey and discussed, well, I don't know, the war on terrorism?) indicates a lack of seriousness about international affairs. The domestic political fallout is secondary, I'd say, and if Bush is more concerned about that than about anything else, then we're really in trouble. We're also in trouble if Bush is less concerned about ticking off our NATO allies than ticking off his family, who probably should know that he is the President, after all.

MORE: see above.

MORE: The comments at Jim Joyner's blog cast some doubt on the infamous LAX-delaying haircut episode; fair enough. I have no idea whether or not an expensive Clinton haircut actually caused flights to be delayed. It is certainly true that this story helped to craft an image of Clinton as being excessively self-regarding, and at the very least someone dedicated a whole lot of time and thought to spreading the story, whatever its factual basis. With Bush's insistence that his daughters' graduations take precedence over NATO, however, no one has made a similar effort, and the press hasn't shown any interest in integrating this episode into a more general account of Bush's character. That's a shame.