President Barack Obama departed Washington for 17 days of family and golf time at a $12 million estate on Martha’s Vineyard on Friday – a day earlier than originally planned. If past is precedent, however, the president should assume his annual vacation will be interrupted or cut short, as it has been for the previous six summers he’s been in office.

The president’s vacation is always a working one, marked by daily briefings and meetings with advisers both traveling with the president and staying in Washington. But unlike Bill Clinton, who treated Martha’s Vineyard like a captive audience for constant schmoozing, or George W. Bush, who created a “Western White House” over the course of a month in Crawford, Texas, Obama typically tries to truly unplug with his family during his time off.


Still, signs were already pointing toward a busier-than-hoped vacation in the hours before Air Force One took off for Massachusetts. Just the day before, Obama didn’t expect to do much personal lobbying during his time off, which falls right in the middle of Congress’s 60-day consideration period for the Iran deal.

“I doubt it,” said Press Secretary Josh Earnest with a grin on Thursday, asked whether the president would calling members of Congress. That was before a key Democrat, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, announced he was against the deal.

Earnest acknowledged Friday that he’d been a little “flippant” in his earlier response, saying, “It’s possible that the president could make some one-off calls.”

But some extra phone calls pale in comparison to the other interruptions that have pulled Obama away from his time biking, golfing and book-shopping on the Vineyard.

In 2011, the Obamas had to leave a day early as Hurricane Irene churned up the East Coast. In 2013, at a podium bathed in sun and surrounded by trees in Chilmark, Obama decried the bloodshed in Cairo as he announced the U.S. would cancel its military exercises with the Egyptian government following the military ouster of an elected president.

Last year was especially rough. The president built in a break from his break – a two-day return to Washington for meetings at the White House – before he even arrived in the Vineyard. Still, he had to deliver three statements to the traveling press from the island, addressing the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., after the shooting of an unarmed black teen, the execution of James Foley by ISIS and elections in Iraq. On top of those somber appearances, he also made a command performance at a high-dollar fund-raiser for Senate Democrats at a Tisbury, Mass., mansion.

Obama faced criticism for hitting the links shortly after his remarks on Foley’s gruesome beheading, and he acknowledged the discordant image sent the wrong message.

“Because the possibility of a jarring contrast given the world’s news, is always— there’s always going to be some tough news somewhere— is going to be there,” he said on “Meet the Press” in September. “But there’s no doubt that— after having talked to the families, where it was hard for me to hold back tears listening to the pain that they were going through, after the statement that I made, that you know, I should’ve anticipated the optics.”

Indeed, optics have soured Obama’s vacations before, too. In 2010, as the administration’s so-called “Recovery Summer” was coming to a close, Obama’s 11-day stay at the reportedly $50,000-per-week Blue Heron Farm was punctuated by two days of reports showing a weak housing market. The White House trumpeted Obama’s conference call from Vineyard Haven with his economic team in a bid to show a president still engaged with the economic concerns of everyday Americans.

Americans handed the House of Representatives to Republicans in the midterm elections just over two months later.

During his own re-election campaign, Obama skipped the Vineyard vacation altogether.

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