Obama opens vacation with security briefing, golf

President Barack Obama. AP photo

VINEYARD HAVEN—The White House showed President Barack Obama absorbed in a security briefing with his top anti-terror aide Friday, countering Republican complaints about his summer vacation.

Arguing the duties of his job follow him everywhere, aides released a picture of Obama, in a blue leisure shirt, receiving his daily intelligence briefing from John Brennan at rented Blue Heron Farm on Martha’s Vineyard.

Officials did not divulge contents of the briefing but it took place at a time of escalating fighting between Moammar Gadhafi’s forces and Libyan rebels and followed a US call for Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad to go.

Obama also received a briefing on paper from his economic team.

A top economics official, Brian Deese, will arrive next week to keep Obama up to speed on global finance issues during his 10-day vacation, and the president will also prepare a major speech on jobs he will deliver next month.

Also Friday, Obama drew a crowd as his motorcade snaked through country lanes and headed into the picturesque tourist town of Vineyard Haven when he took his daughters Malia and Sasha to a local bookstore.

Several onlookers chanted “four more years” in reference to the 2012 election, before the president emerged from the shop to work the crowd.

He then teed off at a private golf course on the balmy island off Cape Cod with his longtime friend Eric Whitaker and several aides.

The White House argues that despite gloomy economic times, reflected by a nosediving stockmarket, Americans do not begrudge the president a few days of rest with his family.

“The president of the United States is the president of the United States, wherever he goes. That’s the job he ran for. That is what the American people expect. And it’s the job he’s doing,” said Obama spokesman Joshua Earnest.

Republicans, seeking to further wound a weakened president, have loudly criticized Obama’s decision to spend 10 days on an island known as a summer retreat for millionaires.

Former vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin told Fox News that Obama’s vacation was “very, very tone deaf” at a time of deep economic gloom.

“I think he is going to hear from enough Americans that he will come back early. I think he is going to keep his head in the sand there in Martha’s Vineyard.”

Republican presidential front runner Mitt Romney also took a shot.

“If I were president today, I wouldn’t be looking to go spend 10 days on Martha’s Vineyard,” he told WLS 980 Radio in Chicago on Wednesday.

“If you’re the president of the United States, and the nation is in crisis, and we’re in a jobs crisis right now, then you shouldn’t be out vacationing.”

The Republican National Committee meanwhile created a website at Obamagetaway.com featuring mocked-up postcards of Obama in various pursuits, including biking, playing basketball, surfing and carrying a beach towel.

One card featured a famous picture of a bare chested Obama walking out of the Hawaii surf with the slogan “It’s hot outside, heading to take a double dip,” playing on renewed fears of a slump back into recession.