Buddy, life's a breeze for the man in the eye of the storm

Entering the White House, do not expect any laughs from the stony-faced security guards. Elsewhere, flustered aides charge about in the furnace of a Washington summer, sweating over their files and clipboards.

But if there is one person in the building who gives a good impression that life is something of a breeze, it is President George W. Bush.

'How y'all doing?' he asks as he bounds into the Roosevelt Room of the West Wing to talk about his upcoming trip to China, South Korea and Thailand - a mission almost certain to be his last to East Asia. Any sense of ceremony is automatically forgone as he puts himself on first name terms with a gaggle of regional reporters. Then the names are dispensed with, in favour of 'buddy' or 'lad', sometimes delivered with a one-liner.

He's eager to give a sense that his East Asian diplomacy is at least one success story from a presidency that will see him leave office in January as one of the most unpopular leaders in modern US history, thanks to the quagmire of Iraq and a severe economic downturn. If that is weighing on him, he doesn't show it.

In the comfort of the windowless room that once served as the president's office, Mr Bush talks extremely quickly, sometimes covering several concepts and countries in a couple of sentences. The famously stilted public utterances - whose delivery was described earlier in his career as like watching a drunk man crossing an icy street - are the stuff of his rare live press conferences. In a small group, he clearly feels on safer ground and the words fly. He occasionally gets ahead of himself, as China segues into South Korea and then into Iran. Yet through it all there is a common theme, that he's 'sprinting to the finish' to secure a legacy of deeper relations with the major powers of East Asia, old allies and former foes alike - something no other president has enjoyed, he claims. He repeatedly ties this down to his faith in strong personal diplomacy, based on openness and frankness. 'And my only point to you is, is that I'm very pleased with the state of relations now, and I recognise that it took a lot of work to get them there.

'But I feel comfortable in telling you that if there is a common problem, I've got personal relations with the leaders where I can sit down and say, 'here's my point of view; what is yours?'' he says.