And that was the best part of the Joe Biden presidency. Why didn't Biden just move to Rehoboth Beach in 2020 and cover the other 61% of the last four years?

Frankly, this assessment from the Republican National Committee may be too generous. Yes, Biden spent 577 days outside the White House on R&R. But how much was he ever on the job during the rest of the time?

Biden, 82, took more time off than any other US president in modern history, spending 577 of his 1,463 days in office – or 39% of his presidency — on vacation, according to shocking new data compiled by the Republican National Committee.

The average American — who gets 11 paid vacation days a year — would have to work 52 years to rack up as much down time as Biden scored in his four years.

Just how far off is this from other presidents, though? Not quite as far off as one would imagine, and we have an apples/oranges problem with the comparison to "the average American" too:

Biden’s relaxation ratio outstripped the previous Vacationer-in Chief, George H.W. Bush, who spent 37% of his presidency — 543 of 1,461 days – away from the White House.

Biden’s out-of-office ratio far surpasses time off taken by Trump — who spent 26% of his first term away from Washington, D.C. — 381 of his 1,461 days in office, records show.

This counts weekend days as well as weekdays on "vacation," to the extent that presidents ever actually vacation. The comparison to American workers is specious because of that problem; most of us take the weekends off, and we don't count that as "vacation." (I'm clearly an exception to the rule.) If we count weekends, most American workers average 115 vacation days a year, or 460 over a four-year period. By that standard, Biden and Bush 41 took more time off than most Americans, but Trump actually took less. 

Still, this is a cheap shot, generally speaking. Presidents who go to Kennebunkport, Crawford, Hawaii, or Mar-a-Lago for the congressional recess are still working, even on the weekends. The presidency is a 24/7 job for most presidents, and their private homes or vacation homes get fitted for that purpose. The Reagan ranch used to be called the Western White House for that very reason. Presidents might play golf on the weekend, but that's not the same thing as taking a whole day off, and even on the golf course they remain in charge. 

Biden's case is different for a couple of reasons. First off, the Biden team kept fumbling the optics by repeatedly allowing Biden to snooze on the beach while at his Rehoboth house, and the images made Biden look asleep at the switch. I was amazed that no one in the White House figured out the terrible optics of a president sleeping on the beach, and tell Biden to take his naps out of sight on the lanai instead. Yet they allowed Biden to get photographed like that repeatedly during the four years of his (p)residency. We have lots of those pics in our licensed library, and we only choose a handful of news images from the AP/Reuters image service each month. 

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However, it wasn't just the optics or even mainly the optics. The RNC counted the days outside of the White House, but ... how many days inside the White House did Biden actually work on a full-time basis? Did Biden ever work a straight-8 like "the average American worker" does every weekday? We may still need to wait a few months before the tell-alls start emerging from White House staffers looking to cash out on their experience, but we already know plenty. The Wall Street Journal reported the day after Biden dropped out of the presidential race that Democrats knew Biden was suffering from incapacitation as far back as October 2021. They had reported a couple of weeks prior that European leaders had noticed Biden's reduced energy and capacity for at least several months before it got exposed in the presidential debate on June 27. 

More to this point, only after the debate did the Protection Racket Media bother to investigate what had been obvious to Americans all along -- that Biden couldn't do the job. The Associated Press, currently taking a Much Courage So Journalist stand over the Gulf of America (née Gulf of Mexico), ran a gaslighting effort in early July insisting that Biden was sharp as a tack ... at times ... on good days. Carl Bernstein also belatedly spilled the beans by admitting that everyone in Washington knew Biden was slipping badly for quite a while. It turns out that the White House had spent four years arranging and rearranging his schedule to cover for his "bad days," and even on his good days, Biden only reliably worked between 10 am and 4 pm -- Dr. Pepper hours, as I called them. 

Did Joe Biden ever work an honest, full shift as President? That's a better question than counting beach days on Rehoboth. And that leads to the real question: who actually was in charge of the executive branch and making the decisions outside of the Dr. Pepper hours on Biden's "good days"?