The President apparently uses his iPod solely to soundtrack his regular 18-mile bike rides. This week’s release of the tracklisting of the iPod was preceded by a warning from Mark McKinnon, Mr Bush’s 2004 media strategist: “Don’t psychoanalyse the song selection,” he ordered. “It’s music to get over the next hill.”

But are we going to pay any attention to what Mr McKinnon says? After all, the last thing he said was: “Vote George Bush.” He doesn’t have a faultless track record on impartial analysis.

Of course, President Bush’s taste in music reveals a great deal about him. For starters, it reveals, rather reassuringly, that the President has been so busy ruling the free world that he hasn’t had time to watch Yo! MTV Raps or spend hours downloading latest “crunk” (that’s minimalist R’n’B to the uninitiated) MP3 from Lime- wire. Mr Bush has his Pod filled for him by Mr McKinnon , who presumably knows his tastes, and obliged with what the redneck club owner in The Blues Brothers referred to as “both kinds of music — country and western”.

It’s a very Texan line-up with selections from huge country artists such as George Jones and Alan Jackson — a man so authentically down at home that he wears a Stetson on the cover of all his 14 albums. Mr McKinnon included a quantity of country’s drunker, younger sibling, honky-tonk, from the Gourds, ideal accompaniment for “the Alligator”, a drunken dance in which you roll around on the floor and a great favourite of Mr Bush’s during his years at Yale.

On iPod One, Stevie Ray Vaughan’s passionate, eclectic blues-rock echoes his spectacular substance abuse. Similarly, John Hiatt’s rootsy fusion of rock’n’roll and country was for many years accompanied by his own rootsy fusion of mixing cocaine with his whiskey.

The most notable aspect of Mr Bush’s fairly predictable selection of babyboomer tunes is its extraordinarily limited demographic spread — no black artists, no gay artists, no world music, only one woman, no genre less than 25 years old, and no Beatles.

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