"Barbara will go crazy!!" . . . the Bush's Maine pool caretaker speaks out

[Bluebear]

James Razsa at a recent Iraq war protest in Kennebunkport, Maine; behind him, the Bush family's vacation home where he cleans the pool.

...Razsa recalls one day when former first lady Barbara Bush was on her way over, and it looked like there wouldn't be time to bring the pool's temperature up to her desired 82 degrees in time. The family's caretaker was in a panic, he says.

"He kept shouting, 'Barbara will go crazy! Barbara will go crazy!'" Razsa recalls. "This is the same woman who after Hurricane Katrina said (of the Houston Astrodome refugees), 'You know, they're underprivileged anyway, so this -- this is working very well for them.'" ...

"Seeing so much power accumulated in the hands of one person was just so weird," he says of his first time inside, about five months ago. "These people were just concepts in my head before this."

As for actual sightings, the Bushes have been elusive. At one point Barbara zipped by on a golf cart; at another, George indicated from afar that the pool looked terrific. (Note to communications staff: Would be funny if he said, "Read my lips" when communicating at a distance.) Otherwise the ex-president and his family have kept out of sight. For Razsa, his job -- the only one he could find -- put him directly in touch with the very sort of power he holds partly responsible for his, and other people's, hard times.

"I look at the biggest middle finger in the world all day," is his more succinct explanation. I ask Razsa if he has a monologue loaded up, in the event that his next encounter was at closer range. To my surprise, the idea doesn't appeal. "What do you say? 'Thanks for School of the Americas, and Iran-Contra, and NAFTA, and shipping all those jobs overseas, and arming Saddam, and funding the Taliban?' What do you say -- 'You're a jerk?' There's nothing that can be put into a sentence that would capture the lives these people have taken, and the way of life that's been taken."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article/article?f=/g/a/2007/09/24/onthejob.DTL