Read Dan Froomkin [emphasis added]:

White House spokesman Trent Duffy said this yesterday: “I hope people don’t draw conclusions from the president getting a single briefing. He received multiple briefings from multiple officials, and he was completely engaged at all times.”

But where, then, is the first-hand evidence of this engagement? Where is the evidence of Bush’s leadership?

The government’s response to Hurricane Katrina was (and continues to be) a massive failure. The new videotape offers a visceral illustration of how some, if not a lot of the blame, lay in a leader who saw his job as expressing unjustified confidence and making empty promises, rather than taking action to make sure his people were safe.

Hurricane Katrina (as I wrote as early as Aug. 31 ) was the second great challenge of Bush’s presidency.

Which inevitably makes me think of how Bush responded, in a moment also “caught on tape,” to his first. After finding out that the nation was under attack on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Bush remained frozen in his seat in a Florida classroom for seven minutes.

The grainy video from that classroom, a hallmark of Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” can be found at The Memory Hole.

A staff report from the 9/11 commission described that morning:

“The President was seated in a classroom of second graders when, at approximately 9:05, Andrew Card whispered to him: ‘A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.’ The President told us his instinct was to project calm, not to have the country see an excited reaction at a moment of crisis.”

But even after he left the classroom, he didn’t call the Pentagon. He didn’t ask if there were other aircraft hijacked or missing. Instead, he and his staff worked on a statement to the press.

Faced with challenges like these — an attack on our nation or a natural disaster bearing down on our shores — we can reasonably expect that our presidents will stand up, demand answers and options, and lead.

If the White House insists that Bush did that with Hurricane Katrina, it is incumbent upon them to back up that claim up with evidence. Otherwise, the image of him mouthing platitudes threatens to become defining of his presidency.

Eric Alterman:

Tuesday night, ABC News’ Elizabeth Vargas asked the President about the administration’s response to Katrina, and the failures of the Homeland Security Department, an institution the president opposed until it became politically impossible to do so. The President admitted, “There was no situational awareness, and that means that we weren’t getting good, solid information from people who were on the ground…in many cases we were relying upon the media, who happened to have better situational awareness than the government.”

Viewers must have been confused. Was that supposed to be an excuse or an explanation? How in the world was such a failure possible four years after 9/11? The President even offered DHS head Michael Chertoff his own “Brownie” moment during the interview, saying that he thinks he’s “doing a fine job”. Given the President’s assessment of Michael Brown’s job in New Orleans and the Congressional Medals of Honor be bestowed on Paul “Pace Yourself” Bremer and George “Slam Dunk” Tenet – one can only imagine what it takes to demonstrate genuine incompetence in this administration.

And the moral is, strutting around in a flight suit is not “leadership.” I think finally most people are catching on.

Also: Please take the BlogAds Survey and fill in “The Mahablog” on line 23. Thanks!

Update: See also “What Bush Was Told About Iraq” by Murray Waas.

Last night I linked to the newly discovered pre-Katrina video that shows President Bush beng told Katrina could be bad. The Associated Press reported:

In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans’ Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage.

Bush didn’t ask a single question during the final briefing before Katrina struck on Aug. 29, but he assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: “We are fully prepared.”

Bob Geiger wrote,

Referring multiple times to Katrina as “the big one,” Brown also told Bush that the Louisiana Superdome, sitting 12 feet below sea level, might also fall apart and create, in the ex-FEMA chief’s words, “a catastrophe within a catastrophe.”

Bush asked no questions during the briefing – can you imagine Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter sitting silently with something of this scope about to happen in our country? – and showed no evidence of grasping the magnitude of the hit New Orleans was about to take.

Then, four days after Katrina struck, Bush appeared on television and acted as if the hurricane’s potential for severe damage was a surprise to everyone. “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees,” Bush said in an interview with ABC News.

Via Steve Soto at the Left Coaster:

Listen, here’s the problem that happened in Katrina. There was no situational awareness, and that means that we weren’t getting good, solid information from people who were on the ground, and we need to do a better job.

–Bush, Tuesday, to ABC’s Elizabeth Vargas

Translation: Nobody told me nothin’, so it ain’t my fault. And that was a lie.

As the tragedy of Katrina unfolded we heard a number of excuses for the President’s odd behavior, including the argument that disaster response isn’t really the federal government’s job. Whatever bad happened was entirely the fault of state and local governments. But here we see Bush telling those state and local government officials that the feds were “fully prepared” to respond and would send every resource at their disposal.

Jane Hamsher writes,

Hoping to counteract the damage of the story, the White House leaked Newsweek transcripts from daily noon FEMA conference calls during and after Katrina to show how engaged and concerned Dubya was. Trouble is, these are transcripts that they had initially refused to provide to congressional investigators.

Once again, we see that the Bushies are helplessly inept at responding to a crisis, but nobody can beat ’em at political damage control. Does this, perhaps, tell us something about Bushie priorities?

I’ll have more to say later today about the ongoing struggle between Bush and Reality. But let’s think a minute about the struggle between Bush and Competence. I’ve said before that I’ve had the misfortune of working for a lot of incompetent bosses, but even the dumbest among those understood that if some Big Bleeping Deal was going in they had to at least look as if they were busily engaged with it. Yet while corpses rotted on the streets of New Orleans, Bush was merrily traipsing around the country cutting cakes and playing rock star.

Another excuse is that his staff wasn’t keeping him informed. Even if that’s true, this says to me that the President feels absolutely no sense of responsibility for keeping himself informed. Before the hurricane he sat in a room with a bunch of experts who told him there could be devastating damage and loss of life. Yet he was so disinterested in the aftermath that it took him days to catch up to what everyone else in the country was watching on television.

According to Mark Hosenball of Newsweek, the transcripts the White House had initially refused to provide congressional investigators are supposed to show that the President really was engaged in the Katrina disaster but had been given conflicting information about the levee breach.

So instead of demanding better information, Bush traipses around the country cutting cakes and playing rock star. Yeah, I’m real reassured.

If the confusion had lasted only a few hours one might blame bureaucratic incompetence, which I’ll come back to in a second. But the hurricane struck on Monday and Bush didn’t grasp how bad the situation was until Friday (if then). And that was only because his staff put together a DVD of news reports and urged him to watch it.

Regarding the bureaucratic incompetence — the White House continues to have these little communications glitches, as the recent gun accident episode revealed (once again). Is Bush rattling the cages in the White House and demanding better performance from his staff? Has he ever? If so, it ain’t workin’.

Without knowing the man personally it is hard to know why the President is so disturbingly warped. Theories I’ve heard include brain damage from substance abuse and personality disorder resulting from emotionally unavailable parents. We might also reflect on the fact that in his whole life Bush has rarely if ever been in a position to have to work for someone else. Maybe on paper, on some Harken Oil organizational chart, Bush “reported” to somebody. But in reality whatever positions he was given came to him because of his family connections. He was never expected to perform any function except grace the boardroom with his presence. The work of the company just kind of happened without his participation. Maybe he doesn’t know that normally executives are supposed to do stuff.

Whatever. Bottom line, the boy ain’t right.

Maybe the Constitution needs a “twit” clause — a provision for removing a President who is pathologically out to lunch.

This is a big deal.

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?