Bubble wrap

Evan Thomas, as lead writer, in Newsweek explores the inherent limitations of a president infused within a bubble -- and the weird, uncomfortable process of removing the commander-in-chief from his self-created, self-maintained isolation.

I am left to wonder how we have a commander-in-chief who is so removed from reality in a world overflowing with communication and media. Moreover, what does this bubble mean in terms of rebuilding FEMA? Has the president been pulled from that bubble for other events, such as the war on terror or the war in Iraq?

It is troubling that those questions would even be raised.

The bubble burst Friday morning, days after the situation at the Convention Center was a reported crisis, Newsweek:

The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans. Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One.

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.

The federal government was slow to perceive the plight of New Orleans, which is unforgivable. Local authorities were vague in their requests for aid. In addition to this, Bush's management -- dubbed CEO-style but more accurately called aloof and cold -- contributed to the lethargic response, Newsweek:

Bad news rarely flows up in bureaucracies. For most of those first few days, Bush was hearing what a good job the Feds were doing. Bush likes "metrics," numbers to measure performance, so the bureaucrats gave him reassuring statistics. At a press availability on Wednesday, Bush duly rattled them off: there were 400 trucks transporting 5.4 million meals and 13.4 million liters of water along with 3.4 million pounds of ice. Yet it was obvious to anyone watching TV that New Orleans had turned into a Third World hellhole.

Bush's management team, it is now clear, is vertical in structure to a fault -- with a small cadre around the president. To enhance this isolation, Bush's temper and combativeness provokes meetings like this one reported in the aforementioned Newsweek piece:

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.

The president did not growl this time. He had already decided to return to Washington and hold a meeting of his top advisers on the following day, Wednesday. This would give them a day to get back from their vacations and their staffs to work up some ideas about what to do in the aftermath of the storm. President Bush knew the storm and its consequences had been bad; but he didn't quite realize how bad.

This combativeness and the timid cadre around the president was also in Mike Allen's reports in TIME. Bush's isolation is, in part, a result of his bitter demeanor:

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."

More:

The result is a kind of echo chamber in which good news can prevail over bad — even when there is a surfeit of evidence to the contrary.

Something on the scale of the 9/11 commission, an independent commission with the power of subpoena and operating almost entirely in public testimony, is required to repair FEMA, Homeland Security and -- most importantly -- to make sure that what happened in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast never happens again. This sort of commission would not be meant simply to ascribe blame, contrary to the political spin of the legislators allied with the administration. News reports have already ascribed blame in spades.

We must and we will, as a nation, respond better to the next crisis. But, that will require improvements in our government -- local, state and federal -- and improvements in our economics. The government must have better command and control, with the ability to position assets quickly and effectively. Our economics need to promote the equality we believe all Americans should enjoy -- the economic, political and social right to protect your family from harm and to improve your standard of living.

This president, bound and limited in his cadre of smiling faces, is not the man for the job. It requires a non-partisan, non-governmental 9/11-style commission -- something upon which 70 percent of the American people agree, CNN:

Seventy percent of respondents said they favored forming an independent panel to study the government response to the storm.

And we haven't even begun to question if the echo chamber is leading to deadly mistakes in Iraq and the broader war on terror.