I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again — George W. Bush is a terrible manager. He’s all the bad managers I’ve ever had rolled into one bumbling mess, and then some.
Consider: Today Eric Lipton’s New York Times article took us back to the flood waters of New Orleans and the revelation that the White House had been informed of the levee failure much earlier than they had previously admitted.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bush administration officials said they had been caught by surprise when they were told on Tuesday, Aug. 30, that a levee had broken, allowing floodwaters to engulf New Orleans.
But Congressional investigators have now learned that an eyewitness account of the flooding from a federal emergency official reached the Homeland Security Department’s headquarters starting at 9:27 p.m. the day before, and the White House itself at midnight.
Jane Hamsher observes that either no told President Bush about the levee breaks, or he was told and didn’t care. I’m betting on the “no one told him, and he didn’t care, anyway” option.
Just for fun, let’s take a look back at this September 29, 2005 Newsweek article by Evan Thomas, “Katrina: How Bush Blew It.”
It’s a standing joke among the president’s top aides: who gets to deliver the bad news? Warm and hearty in public, Bush can be cold and snappish in private, and aides sometimes cringe before the displeasure of the president of the United States, or, as he is known in West Wing jargon, POTUS. The bad news on this early morning, Tuesday, Aug. 30, some 24 hours after Hurricane Katrina had ripped through New Orleans, was that the president would have to cut short his five-week vacation by a couple of days and return to Washington. The president’s chief of staff, Andrew Card; his deputy chief of staff, Joe Hagin; his counselor, Dan Bartlett, and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, held a conference call to discuss the question of the president’s early return and the delicate task of telling him. Hagin, it was decided, as senior aide on the ground, would do the deed.
Another article, by Mike Allen of Time, is no longer online. But I quoted it here.
A related factor, aides and outside allies concede, is what many of them see as the President’s increasing isolation. Bush’s bubble has grown more hermetic in the second term, they say, with fewer people willing or able to bring him bad news�or tell him when he’s wrong.
Bush has never been adroit about this. A youngish aide who is a Bush favorite described the perils of correcting the boss. “The first time I told him he was wrong, he started yelling at me,” the aide recalled about a session during the first term. “Then I showed him where he was wrong, and he said, ‘All right. I understand. Good job.’ He patted me on the shoulder. I went and had dry heaves in the bathroom.” …
… “His inner circle takes pride in being able to tell him ‘everything is under control,’ when in this case it was not,” said a former aide. “The whole idea that you have to only burden him with things ‘that rise to his level’ bit them this time.”
I’ve seen managers who are abusive to staff and who fly off the handle at bad news, and the result is that no one tells them anything. The staff learns to tip-toe around the manager and hide disasters in the making as long as possible, in the hopes that somehow the mess will be resolved before the boss has to be informed. Such managers not only fail to enable work to get done; they get in the way of work getting done.
But the kinds of workflow problems many of us stumble over in our jobs generally do not make worldwide headlines. I still can’t get over the fact that Bush was so incurious about the damage caused by a major hurricane that he didn’t flip on a television and watch for himself, but was content just to listen to what the lackeys told him. Even the worst manager I’ve ever had wouldn’t have been that incompetent.
I missed Michael “fashion god” Brown’s testimony today. I’ve read some of it and can’t help but suspect it was mostly butt cover. Seems to me that even if FEMA had failed to inform the White House on Monday, however, one might assume the Bush staff was getting a clue by Tuesday. Yet the Evan Thomas article told us Bush was not made aware of how badly the recovery efforts were going until Friday.
You can blame the staff, but who’s responsible for the staff? For that matter, who’s responsible for turning FEMA into a crony-infested mess?
I don’t think anyone can argue that Bush completely blew this event do to lack of response, but at least I can say without any reservation he has remained consistent in all aspects of his responsibilities through out his first term and now sadly his second.
I had lived and worked in Louisiana in the late Sixties and early Seventies and was completely obsessed with what was happening to “my people” when Hurricane Katrina struck. Glued to CNN coverage I knew about the levee breaks almost as soon as they happened. Why did all these fuckin’ bureaucrats need “reports” to know what was happening? Nowadays you can buy a tv for about $19.99 at one of those discount stores.
I get the sense Bush is getting the loyalty he deserves from old Brownie. Similar to the type of loyalty the Dick’s getting from his boy Scooty Puff Junior.
On 8-30-02, when D.C.officialdom spokesperson Michael Chertoff kept repeating the line about ‘the hurricane hit, and we all thought New Orleans had dodged the bullet….THEN the flooding happened’……..a very precise thought went through my head.
My thought at the time: Chertoff is setting up a scenario [which did unfold] whereby the public would see the hurricane and the flooding as TWO SEPARATE EVENTS, thus allowing homeowner insurance carriers to deny coverage to those who had hurricane coverage but not flood coverage.
I would like to see the congressional committee look into whether the insurance industry successfully dodged payouts because of this officialdom spin.
When looking into behavior of those in the pocket of the corporate world, it is always worth asking, who profits?
You are being too kind to George Bush when you say he’s a terrible manager. I’d say that what he’s been doing the past six years is a clear case of criminal incompetence. Either that or he’s engaged in a deliberate attempt to destroy the founding fathers’ conception of separation of powers, judicial review, and congressional oversight.
Look at the people around him. Dick Cheney. Karl Rove. Neither ever hesitate to follow the Orwellian precept of repeating lies until people start believing them.
I fully understand the motives of these fascists. What I can’t comprehend is why they continue to get away with it. The Main Stream Media appears to be, for the most part, paralyzed. They simply write down the Rove talking points as if they were facts.
Four in ten Americans are absolutely convinced that nothing is wrong. They swallow whole whatever Karl puts out there. They flock to the shills and liars on Fox News.
It wasn’t too long ago that I–a former journalist and addicted news junkie–almost stopped reading the Times and the WaPo and the rest. I got sick of the stenography that passes for reporting these days.
Then I found the progressive blogs. Thank God! The world has not yet gone completely mad. And I’m grateful to you, Barbara, for your courage and good sense. I’ll say it again, you were great on C-Span.
God help us all if the country is run, even to a limited extent, by people who get “dry heaves” because THEIR BOSS YELLED AT THEM!???
What the fuck? Tell them don’t EVER set foot on a loading dock. They will be pucking up Gerber’s baby food they ate when they were kids. What the fuck is wrong with this country?
Yep dem Bushies be imcompetent. They should known bout it before it happened.
What the world needs now
Is hate, Bush hate
It’s the only thing
That there’s just too little of
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0615FE3C550C728FDDA10894DD404482&n=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fPeople%2fT%2fTreaster%2c%20Joseph%20B%2e
HURRICANE KATRINA: NEW ORLEANS; Escaping Feared Knockout Punch, Barely, New Orleans Is One Lucky Big Mess
*Please Note: Archive articles do not include photos, charts or graphics. More information.
August 30, 2005, Tuesday
HURRICANE KATRINA: THE OVERVIEW; HURRICANE SLAMS INTO GULF COAST; DOZENS ARE DEAD
*Please Note: Archive articles do not include photos, charts or graphics. More information.
August 30, 2005, Tuesday
By JOSEPH B. TREASTER AND KATE ZERNIKE; JOSEPH B. TREASTER REPORTED FROM NEW ORLEANS FOR THIS ARTICLE, AND KATE ZERNIKE FROM MONTGOMERY, ALA. REPORTING WAS CONTRIBUTED BY ABBY GOODNOUGH IN MOBILE, ALA.; MICHAEL M. LUO IN NEW YORK; JAMES DAO IN HATTIESBURG., MISS.; JEREMY ALFORD IN BATON ROUGE, LA.; RALPH BLUMENTHAL IN HAMMOND, LA.; AND DIANE ALLEN IN DIAMONDHEAD, MISS. (NYT); National Desk
Late Edition – Final, Section A, Page 1, Column 5, 2311 words
DISPLAYING FIRST 50 OF 2311 WORDS -Hurricane Katrina pounded the Gulf Coast with devastating force at daybreak on Monday, sparing New Orleans the catastrophic hit that had been feared…
HURRICANE KATRINA: THE OVERVIEW; NEW ORLEANS IS INUNDATED AS 2 LEVEES FAIL; MUCH OF GULF COAST IS CRIPPLED; TOLL RISES
*Please Note: Archive articles do not include photos, charts or graphics. More information.
August 31, 2005, Wednesday
By JOSEPH B. TREASTER AND N.R. KLEINFIELD; JOSEPH B. TREASTER REPORTED FROM NEW ORLEANS FOR THIS ARTICLE, AND N.R. KLEINFELD FROM NEW YORK. REPORTING WAS ALSO CONTRIBUTED BY ABBY GOODNOUGH, KATE ZERNIKE AND SHAILA DEWAN FROM BILOXI, MISS; FELICITY BARRINGER FROM HOUMA, LA.; RALPH BLUMENTHAL FROM NEW ORLEANS; MICHAEL LUO FROM NEW YORK; JEREMY ALFORD FROM BATON ROUGE, LA.; AND DIANE ALLEN FROM SOUTH DIAMONDHEAD, MISS. (NYT); National Desk
Late Edition – Final, Section A, Page 1, Column 6, 2129 words
CORRECTION APPENDED
DISPLAYING FIRST 50 OF 2129 WORDS -A day after New Orleans thought it had narrowly escaped the worst of Hurricane Katrina’s wrath, water broke through two levees on Tuesday and virtually submerged and isolated the city,…..
C-SPAN ARCHIVES TO RE-AIR…
10:01 AM EST
3:05 (est.)
Senate Committee
Leadership During Hurricane Katrina
Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs
Michael D. Brown , Federal Emergency Management Agency
Robert B. Stephan , Department of Homeland Security
Brown, Michael D., Director (2003-2005), Federal Emergency Management Agency
Stephan, Robert B., Assistant Secretary, Department of Homeland Security, Infrastructure Protection
Rhode, Patrick L., Deputy Director (Act., 2005), Federal Emergency Management Agency
Broderick, Matthew, Director, Department of Homeland Security, Office of Operations Coordination
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s 18th hearing as part of the committee’s investigation of the government’s preparation for and response to Hurricane Katrina examines the leadership of the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Citizens for C-SPAN Companion Networks
http://www.cspanjunkies.org/
re: Bush blowing it… he’s still blowing it…what about the thousands still out of a home, dispersed over several states, mired in a unnerving, depressing, infuriating and mostly silent bout with recovery and reclamation of residence, with no place to vote come November? I am almost sure there is someone thinking ‘if we can just keep these folks (the displaced) from voting, we might have a chance….’
the time has come for constant, repetitive, voluminus and multi-linguistic issuances of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
It is finally a pleasure to hear some truth about this administration. I have felt this way from the very beginning. I can not bear to even listen to Bush any more because he is completely lying to the Nation and using scare tactics to convince the people that he is good for us. Will, he is not good for this country. He is distanting us from other countries, and ignoring the need of the people of the United States. There are more reasons to impeach him than there ever were reasons to impeach President Clinton. God help us for another two years.
Thank you,
Mary
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