Just like peas and carrots

For the Supremely Motivated Self-Starting Student, the senior thesis is an opportunity to shine — a chance to show the world what comes of four years of training at Princeton University, a chance to contribute to the academic body of knowledge, a chance to learn something about life.

For me, it has been an intimidating and lethal obstacle that has shown me how to empathize with Dubya.

I have to say, this is a slightly uncomfortable feeling for me, as I'm not especially a fan of Dubya. I'm a registered Democrat, and I voted for Gore but would have voted for McCain given the chance. Dubya's smoke-and-mirrors tax cut sounds pretty absurd to me, and Ashcroft as attorney general doesn't sit so well either.

But on a more basic level, Dubya is a guy I can relate to. His trips back home to the ranch became more frequent as the campaign dragged on. He had his first excursion to Camp David after two weeks in office. A few weeks later, he invited Tony Blair to join him there — nothing like meeting heads of state to excuse a horseshoe-tossing trip.

The most likely reason for Dubya's love of retreat is that he finds it difficult to do really serious thinking for more than a few weeks at a time. He's a little lazy mentally and needs a break every so often.

Frankly, that sounds a lot like me. I, like Dubya, enjoy getting away for the weekend and ignoring work until later. I sometimes do this several weekends in a row, and frequently the work actually does go away on its own. Dubya and I don't like big words or people who use them unnecessarily. We don't like to read fifty pages that can be summarized in two.

Dubya and I know what we like, and we know that we don't need to know details about everything. We like efficiency. We like pie charts. We like smiling faces, and we definitely like people who like us. We intensely dislike pretentious people.

Dubya and I feel as though we gauge people pretty well, so that if we delegate something, it'll get done at least as well as we could do it on our own — and usually better. We're managers, not intellectuals. We like nicknames, and we bond with other people by making fun of them. We're not policy wonks who can focus on a single issue for an entire career.

People around Dubya and me, friends included, like to joke about our fuzzy-headedness because, like Dubya, I sometimes lose focus during simple conversations or use confusing constructions in my speech because I'm too lazy to find the right word. The humor isn't in the mistake; it's that as a Princeton student, I'm supposed to think more clearly than how my rambling suggests I do. Dubya's our President, so people tend to expect that of him too and give him a hard time when he forgets what sentence he's on or how to conjugate a certain verb. Don't let that fool you; Dubya and I are clever enough to know how to check our grammar with a word processor. And we send great e-mails.

So as I sit down to do my thesis (and get up and walk around and talk to friends and sit back down again), I imagine Dubya at his desk. It's likely a lot bigger and cleaner than mine, but I imagine him sitting down to do some task: does he look out his window and think about Texas? Does he wonder if maybe he isn't cut out for his job after all? Does he call Dick Cheney or Colin Powell to see if he can get an extension on his assignment?

Does he take occasional breaks to play video games? I bet he does. Dubya is a self-absorbed Ivy League kid like me, scoffing at overly energetic peers who race each other to finish their tasks faster and better than each other. And we're doing okay; I'm going to finish my four years soon, and so will Dubya. Maybe he'll even stick around for four more, if he can psyche himself up for the long days and twenty-questions games of the campaign trail again. But don't worry about us; we'll be okay — just as soon as we get back from vacation. Joe Dague is a politics major from Carlisle, PA. He can be reached at joedague@princeton.edu.