I’ve skewered Newsweek in the past for its excessive reluctance to call a spade a spade when it comes to the Bush administration’s failings. While this Newsweek piece about the President’s response to Katrina manages to be preternaturally polite — and doesn’t absolve state and local authorities — it does quickly zoom in on the heart of the matter.

How this could be — how the president of the United States could have even less “situational awareness,” as they say in the military, than the average American about the worst natural disaster in a century — is one of the more perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a national disgrace.

President George W. Bush has always trusted his gut. He prides himself in ignoring the distracting chatter, the caterwauling of the media elites, the Washington political buzz machine. He has boasted that he doesn’t read the papers. His doggedness is often admirable. It is easy for presidents to overreact to the noise around them.

But it is not clear what President Bush does read or watch, aside from the occasional biography and an hour or two of ESPN here and there. Bush can be petulant about dissent; he equates disagreement with disloyalty. After five years in office, he is surrounded largely by people who agree with him. Bush can ask tough questions, but it’s mostly a one-way street.

Newsweek concludes that “Bush’s leadership style and the bureaucratic culture combined to produce a disaster within a disaster.” It’s a fair assessment, especially after passages that describe the President’s aides as being fearful to give him bad news of any kind.

Five years ago, it looked as if putting a guy with a business degree in charge might at least have the benefit of a certain level-headedness. The MBA President! No ordinary POTUS, but a hardbitten, dyed-in-the-wool Executive-in-Chief! A results-oriented fighter with a penchant for hacking through red tape!

Today, that notion, that promise — along with the expectation of a certain competence-under-pressure — lies buried beneath millions of gallons of oily, snake-infested water, unmoored from reality, gone forever.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 12th, 2005 at 10:48 pm by Rogier van Bakel and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.