Free as air

With President Clinton on a four-day Western tramp praising wetlands, boosting industry, hobnobbing with Hollywood and, most of all, helping the Democratic Party retire its $14 million debt, the average citizen might well wonder just how much it costs to operate Air Force One.

Go ahead, take a stab. Nope, not even close. Try $34,200 per hour. And that’s just to keep the airborne White House aloft and pointed in the right direction. The honey-roasted peanuts are extra.

So, just the 10-hour round trip from DC to LA has a base price of $342,000. Add in the side trips to Vegas, Wichita, Sacramento and Denver, and it starts to run into some real money.

Of course, federal law requires parties benefiting from such presidential peregrinations to reimburse the treasury at — get this — the coach airfare rate, plus a $30 meal per diem. And that’s just for the First Fundraiser and his immediate staff. Bodyguards, assorted aides, sundry hangers-on and bulletproof limosines fly free. Federal lawmakers — the Democrats and Republicans in Congress — may be a lot of things, but they’re not morons. Why should the parties pay for this service when taxpayers are such chumps?

Even better, the law allows the official-business part of these trips to be subtracted from the reimbursement formula. That’s why sandwiched between the Western-style partisan breakfasts, lunches and dinners are such essentials as stops at an elementary school to laud learning, a shipping company to tout trade, an aircraft plant to worship work and a wildlife refuge to smile upon a swamp. Thus, every time the president stands before a blackboard, slaps on a hard hat or pulls up a pair of waders, a write-off is born.

The reason Republicans don’t have a cow about this, of course, is that they did the same thing when they occupied the White House and they’ll do it again given the chance. A new study by the non-partisan Center for Public Integrity — the same outfit that broke the Lincoln Bedroom story — found that, while the 123 largely political domestic trips President Clinton took during the first 10 months of 1996 set a record, Presidents Reagan and Bush were no slouches at going on the dole to chase campaign dollars either.

For those 123 trips, the Dems repaid the taxpayers $544,000, or about $4,500 per junket. When the Air Force One meter is running, that covers about eight minutes. Taxpayers shell out the $29,700 to cover the remaining 52 minutes, but, hey, that’s peanuts.