If there’s one storyline about President Bush I’ve never had any patience for, it’s the idea that he was on an endless holiday during his time in office. Reporters loved to bandy about the number of days the president spent at his ranch in Crawford or at Camp David. The “vacations” fed the notion that the president was fundamentally unserious, a slacker who stumbled into history and wasn’t up to his job.

What made the stories particularly galling is that they were propagated by reporters, a breed of people who are allergic to their own offices. Journalists, apparently, are able to work effectively from any bar, coffee shop, or hotel lobby in the world, but the president of the United States can’t possibly get anything done unless he’s in the Oval Office.

The times have changed, and so has the storyline, now that President Obama is in office. I nearly choked when I read AP reporter Phillip Elliott’s dispatch about the president’s return from Hawaii, the theme of which is that this poor president just doesn’t get time to relax. Those gosh-darned world events keep invading his private time.

Even though it was called a vacation, the trip to Obama’s childhood home was hardly the holiday most Americans seek. Between golf outings, he phoned his homeland security secretary and counterterrorism adviser for regular updates. Rather than restaurant recommendations, the president was handed thrice-daily updates from the White House Situation Room. And an attack that killed seven U.S. intelligence officers put him on the phone with the CIA director before heading to the island’s North Shore for a party with high school friends….

So even though Obama wore casual slacks on New Year’s Day when he took his daughters to see a 3-D version of the film “Avatar,” that BlackBerry on his belt wasn’t for fashion. For a wartime president who dodged dealing with a terrorist attack on Christmas, it’s just one reminder he’s never completely distanced from his job as commander in chief.

Exactly right. But I wonder why reporters were slow to acknowledge that reality over the past eight years.