Santa Barbara, California – Even presidents need to take a vacation. But what is a vacation for the commander-in-chief is a lot of work for the people in places where the president chooses to relax.
Hotels book up fast with the entourage that follows a president — Secret Service, aides and the press. Restaurant reservations become impossible. Traffic created by a presidential motorcade leads to local streets shut down.
Almost every president has been tied to their favorite getaway in the popular imagination: President Biden and Rehoboth Beach; former President Donald Trump and Mar-a-Lago; former President Barack Obama and Martha’s Vineyard; former President George W. Bush and Crawford, Texas; and former President Bill Clinton and the Hamptons.
This week, Mr. Biden is vacationing in Santa Ynez, California — a small Southern California town located in the heart of Santa Barbara wine country. But as the world monitors tensions in the Middle East and the Democratic National Convention goes on in Chicago, the president can never be truly unplugged.
“There’s no such thing as a presidential vacation,” says Russell Riley, co-chair of the Miller Center’s Presidential Oral History Program and author of “Inside the Clinton White House: An Oral History.” “It is certainly true that they go away and that there’s a different dynamic, and that the change of pace can be restful. But they’re still on duty.”
And if the president is on duty, so is the president’s team. Everywhere the president goes, a temporary Situation Room has to be set up and ready to go if needed.
A town more used to the president’s presence is Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where the Bidens own a vacation home and often visit during the summer.
Mr. Biden has been seen to frequent a brunch restaurant there called Egg. Hope Snider, a manager at Egg, said she was nervous at first to wait on the first family, but that they and the Secret Service were nothing but friendly and easygoing.
“We appreciate that out of all the restaurants they come to ours,” says Snider. “It creates a buzz around town. They hear the president was in last weekend. It definitely brings a few people in.”
Ahead of such a seemingly casual breakfast, Secret Service agents scout the area days in advance, checking every entrance, exit and potential security threat.
“Especially right now, with an assassination attempt already in the forefront of every Secret Service agent’s mind, I am very confident that though it’s a lame duck president, they’re still very concerned about that security perimeter,” says Johanna Maska, former White House director of press advance for President Obama. “Because the president is still the person who’s making every decision when it comes to our biggest global issues, and has the nuke codes with him everywhere he goes.”
Maska said that Obama, like other presidents on vacation, would limit his movements, particularly on a holiday if it would cause too much disruption for the town. But regardless, every potential stop, be it a beach or coffee shop, had to be checked in advance by the Secret Service.
One of the worst ways a presidential visit can affect a town is hours-long traffic jams.
When the Clintons took a trip to the Hamptons, on Long Island, in 1998, locals feared it would take 10 to 12 hours to get in and out, leading residents to stock up on groceries the Thursday before the president’s arrival, according to archives of the local paper, the Sag Harbor Express. But the fear of traffic was so great that many people simply did not go out that weekend, resulting in quieter roads than on a typical Hamptons summer day.
The optics of a vacation location can also be a consideration for White House teams.
Clinton reportedly solicited polling in 1997 to find out what “married people with kids” approved of for vacation activities in order to improve his image. According to political adviser Dick Morris, the results suggested fishing and hiking in a mountain location, so the Clinton family traveled to Wyoming for an all-American vacation out West instead of a fashionable East Coast hotspot.
“There was a sense that going to Martha’s Vineyard or the Hamptons was communicating a lesson to the American people that this wasn’t quite a small ‘d’ democratic vacation. So they went out there, but Clinton had allergies, and I don’t think that trip went very well,” says Riley.
So as Mr. Biden vacations in wine country, another town will be hard at work accommodating the traveling White House that follows the leader of the United States.