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As Barack Obama settles into the White House, the differences between the way the old and new presidents manage their time will begin to show. Now it is time to break the puritan fiction that the only way to achieve is to get up early and live clean.
Ex-president Bush rose at 5.45am and was at his desk by 6.45am. He worked until 6pm, taking meetings in strict five-minute blocks. He ran three miles in 21 minutes before lunch every day. He does not drink. Women's skirts – in his White House – had to fall below the knee.
Obama gets up hours later – aides during his campaign said he did much of his strategising after midnight. He smokes, he drinks beer while watching sports, and has mentioned keeping his regular poker night while president. He keeps a box of salted caramel chocolates on hand at all times. And the Narciso Rodriguez dress Michelle Obama wore on the night her husband won the presidency was a dangerous inch or so above her knees.
We now know that Bush's early rising just gave him more time to ruin things in his inimitable and boisterous style. Obama, having strolled in to work at a reasonable hour, probably found even the chair in the Oval Office no longer spins round and has a squeaky wheel.
Normal, vice-ridden, vaguely lazy workers must use this example to fight the stigma attached to arriving late, having stayed up until 3am watching Beverly Hills Cop II. Or eating seven cupcakes and some Kettle Chips for lunch.
The problem is that these dawn rats just won't shut up about the joy of seeing sunrises and consuming berries. It's a statistical fact that you are no more than nine yards from someone about to advise someone else of the productivity benefits of getting up early. Benjamin Franklin wrote a book called Early Rising: Natural, Social and Religious Duty. Aristotle said: "It is well to be up before daybreak, for such habits contribute to health, wealth, and wisdom."
You may argue that both Franklin and Aristotle got a lot done, but they just seem to have been so insufferably smug and loud about it. Which is perhaps why they drown out great late-risers, who tend to be less pious. Like Picasso, who once said: "I understand why they execute condemned men at dawn. I just have to see the dawn in order to have my head roll all by itself."
Or Robert Frost, one of the great American poets. Surely, if there was ever a candidate for early-rising greatness, it is he. He lived on a farm. Farmers get up early. The great and good, so we're told, also get up early. But no – he milked his cows at midnight because he couldn't be bothered to get up at 5am to do it.
Once you start looking at the clean living lobby's case, it all gets very shaky. Churchill smoked, drank and swore. Hitler did none of these things, choosing instead to frolic wholesomely with his dogs in meadows. JFK added philandering to Churchill's vices, as well as sharing the wartime PM's cigar habit. In fact, the night before Kennedy banned all Cuban products from the US – including his beloved Petit Upmann cigars – he dispatched his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, to buy 1,200 so he'd have a stock of them.
Augusto Pinochet, on the other hand, was an early riser who enjoyed a nice morning walk rather than motorboating Marilyn Monroe or a meditative smoke.
But, even in the face of such overwhelming evidence, it is still hard to admit to your colleagues that you see 5am more often before bed than after it. Samuel Johnson, the 18th-century author who found time to compile the first dictionary, even succumbed to the pressure. He guiltily admitted: "I have, all my life long, been lying till noon; yet I tell all young men, and tell them with great sincerity, that nobody who does not rise early will ever do any good."
In the case of former president Bush, we have the most high-profile example that Johnson sadly misinformed the young men of his acquaintance. So from now on, with a brand new president in office, indulge your vices and roll in to work late. It's for your own good.
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