In the wake of the loss of New Orleans at the hands of the least competent kleptocracy this country has yet seen, there has been a lot of talk about what this reveals about the leadership that brought us to this point.
The mantra for years has been that the government should be run like a business, with goals and accountability (we’ll set restoring honor and integrity to the office to one side).
In the business world, leaders are known for the decisions they make.
The incumbent has demonstrated no leadership qualities. Consider the choices he made when he learned from the Governor of LA. just how bad things were.
There are a number of steps Bush could have taken, short of a full-scale federal takeover, like ordering the military to take over the pitiful and (by now) largely broken emergency communications system throughout the region. But the president, who was in San Diego preparing to give a speech the next day on the war in Iraq, went to bed.
Did he ask his staff, his DHS secretary, for a briefing on his plans? Did he request a status report to be made available the following morning? No, he went to bed. If this has been a terror attack, would he have been any less blasé, any less incurious? He went on to become the target of a thousand PhotoShoppings as he played his guitar: I think we have to assume he didn’t ask for, nor did he receive, any further information.
UPDATE: TIME.com Print Page: TIME Magazine — Living Too Much in the Bubble?:
The day after Katrina’s landfall, Bush awoke in San Diego and just after 5 a.m. local time talked to an aide about the seriousness of the storm, then convened an emergency conference call of his top staff. He was scheduled to spend a few more nights at the ranch, but an aide said he blurted out, “We’re going back.” Bush also said he wanted Cabinet members recalled from vacations. At a Cabinet meeting last week, according to a participant, Bush said he knew he had “a big problem to solve.”
So he did have more information, but yet he continued on with a planned luncheon stop.
If we take a business-like approach to this, how do we reward someone who, through callous disregard or complete ignorance, allowed the world’s fourth business seaport to be disrupted, allowed more than 100,000 people to be flooded out of their homes, and saddled the state and the nation with the costs of rebuilding one of the country’s most visited cities?
100 years ago, this kind of performance would get you escorted into a small room with a revolver on the table, and the expectation that you would do the Right Thing. A simple resignation, preceded by a clean slate by firing the entire cabinet, would suffice.
[composed and posted with ecto]