CRAWFORD — With 11 days left in the Bush presidency, the White House continues to deal with a world in crisis, both on the home front and abroad.

The president’s lieutenants certainly look busy. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson struggles with an out-of-control recession. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice charts a choppy course for the United States in the Israeli-Gaza strife. Defense Secretary Robert Gates amazes all, overseeing two wars with a military stretched taut.

A White House staffer this week told me by phone that nobody’s coasting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

“The president says we’re sprinting to the finish,” he said. “Everyone is on board with that.”

Yet, signs suggest the president is ready to be done with the business of running the nation. Judging from the number of high-profile interviews he’s given lately, he’s ready to get on with the next order of business — managing the Big Spin. That’s where former presidents get swept up in the reconstruction of their legacies, the polishing of their images.

And the rugged, 1,600-acre Bush ranch near Crawford — so much a part of the president’s fiercely independent, down-to-earth, tall-in-the-saddle image — where does it figure in a Bush post-presidency?

Some aren’t so sure anymore.

For most of his presidency, the answer seemed sure, at least to some folks. Bush, who bought the ranch in 1999 on the eve of his 2000 presidential bid, spoke often enough of the inspiring, down-home values of fellow Crawford residents. And the Central Texas ranch seemed to become part of his persona.

Certainly he spent plenty of time there. According to news sources, he marked his 77th visit to the ranch during the recent holidays.

CBS News White House reporter Mark Knoller says the president has spent 490 of his 2,922 days in office there. During ranch stays, Bush has made pivotal decisions on everything from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to stem-cell research, and hosted visitors ranging from Russian President Vladimir Putin to Saudi Prince Abdullah.

He received foreign leaders regularly at the White House, but at the so-called “Western White House” he hosted only those he regarded as key allies or world leaders he hoped to cultivate as allies.

He also learned more of the growing anti-war movement when thousands of protesters camped near his ranch in August 2005, sparking counter-protests and bringing the Iraq war into the limelight.

Early in his tenure, the president included Crawford folks in his activities, stopping by the local coffee shop for burgers and introducing local students to Putin. However, after the protests of 2005, Bush’s visits to town or nearby Waco became rare.

The ranch became more and more his refuge.

Expectations that Bush would retire to the ranch after his White House tenure began to fade as his second term wound down.

I remember a few years ago one Trib reader lambasting Bush after his decision to place the George W. Bush Presidential Library at Southern Methodist University, in an affluent part of Dallas, rather than Baylor University, not far from his Central Texas ranch.

Baylor had begun courting the president for his presidential library even before he became president.

“The truth is, we were all duped into believing that President Bush is something that he is not,” Kyle J. Dulock wrote angrily in a letter to the editor in December 2006. “Sadly that happens all too often in today’s politics.

“If I was a betting man,” Dulock wrote, “I’d say President Bush has less than three years left in McLennan County — just long enough for a new president to be sworn in and Mr. Bush to find a new place near the big city, where he can live out his days near his precious library.”

Now, it seems, such doubts have spread to the city of cynicism, Washington, D.C.

Kenneth T. Walsh, the veteran U.S. News & World Report staffer who wrote the book From Mount Vernon to Crawford: A History of the Presidents and Their Retreats, tells me that Bush-watchers were surprised when word surfaced that the Bushes would reside in Dallas after the White House.

Acknowledging Washington skepticism, Walsh says some now wonder aloud if the Western White House was “more public relations than we originally thought, that it was designed to enhance his image as an outsider and a Westerner and a Texan.”

Which, judging from the widespread criticism of Bush’s “cowboy diplomacy” — talking tough and swaggering amid two wars — may have succeeded all too well.

When I told Walsh that some Crawford residents acknowledged they weren’t sure of the Bush ranch’s future, he understood.

“I think they’re justified to be confused because this is not the impression the president and his spokespersons left.”

In some references to his post-White House days, the president talked longingly of going home to his ranch in Crawford.

However, the first lady confirmed in a recent interview that she and the former president will live in Dallas.

The ranch is for weekends.

“My sense is that the ranch remains very important to him,” Walsh said. “It may turn out to be the kind of ranch that Ronald Reagan had.”

Reagan loved Rancho del Cielo, near Santa Barbara, because he loved the outdoors and the spread wasn’t accessible to the public. While Nancy Reagan preferred the city, she tolerated the ranch because it meant so much to her husband.

Bush may well have revealed his post-presidential preferences during this week’s visit with some second-graders in Philadelphia. In answering a student’s question about where he would live after leaving the White House, the president said he would split his time between the ranch and the 8,500-square-foot Dallas home that his wife bought.

He then admitted he hadn’t seen the house yet.

“That’s called faith,” he told students.

Only time will tell where Prairie Chapel Ranch falls in the Bush post-presidency. But it has some of us wondering about a world figure who readily identified himself as one of us. It also has some of us on guard for fleeting, possibly telltale signs of the ranch’s changing status in the world.

When I left Crawford Thursday afternoon, I found myself behind a pickup coming from very near the Bush ranch, bound for Waco, pulling a trailer of office equipment, including thickly padded executive chairs.

On the pickup truck plates were the words: “U.S. Government.”