Stormy Spins in a Vortex - New York Times
The New York Times

September 24, 2005
Stormy Spins in a Vortex
By
MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

Stormy was testy.

He had put aside the guitar and packed his slicker.

The First Weatherman was working hard, man, harder than he had in years,
even spending nights away from home - and Barney - in strange places.

And still the pesky press was painting him as a storm groupie, racing Rita
to Texas just to score a windswept backdrop to recapture his image as
protector.

Stormy preened for the cameras at FEEBLE FEMA headquarters in Washington
yesterday. On CNN, a bilious image of a hurricane spun next to his head. You
could
imagine the little hurricane trailing him through the rest of his
presidency, like the storm cloud with a lightning bolt that always trailed
Joe Btfsplk
in "Li'l Abner."

He said he was jetting to San Antonio to check out "the prepositioned
assets" and then riding out the storm watching "the interface" between the
military
and state and local authorities at Northcom in Colorado.

But David Gregory at NBC quizzed W. on what good he could really do in
Texas: "Might you get in the way, Mr. President?"

Stormy didn't like that. "One thing I won't do is get in the way," he
snipped.

Mr. Gregory, part of a newly amped-up press corps, followed up: "Isn't there
a risk of you and your entourage getting in the way?"

Now Stormy let off a little high pressure. "There will be no risk of me
getting in the way, I promise you," he said dismissively.

The smart aleck reporters didn't understand how crucial it was for the
president to intertwine, inter alia, with the interfacers. So W. explained
it again:
"See, Northcom is the main entity that interfaces - that uses federal
assets, federal troops, to interface with local and state government. I want
to watch
that relationship."

But soon the San Antonio leg of the trip was scotched amid fears that Stormy
would really be interfering more than interfacing. And besides, the weather
was too sunny there for poses in foul-weather gear.

Stormy is like his dad, Desert Stormy. They both love wardrobe calls: cool
costumes, sports outfits, presidential windbreakers, "Top Gun" get-ups,
weather
gear.

But leadership is not a series of costume changes. The former Andover
cheerleader has been too reliant on photo-ops, drop-bys and "Mission
Accomplished"
strut-bys, rather than a font of personal knowledge.

What Katrina exposed was a president who - remarkable as this may sound -
seemed bored after his re-election, just as Bill Clinton had drifted after
his
re-election. Before the Monica scandal broke, Mr. Clinton's aides had to beg
him to call lawmakers on the Hill to support his own legislative agenda.

Before the Katrina scandal, W. had lethargically wandered the country,
lifelessly promoting his Social Security plan and an energy bill that did
nothing
to solve the energy crisis, and endlessly vacationing in Crawford.

He campaigned as a strong daddy who would keep us safe, but then seemed lost
when his daddy figure, Dick Cheney, kept vacationing as Katrina exposed a
grotesque
rescue apartheid in New Orleans.

The more tuned-in W. is now, the more obvious it is that he tuned out as New
Orleans drowned. There is a high cost for presidential learning curves.

Hundreds of thousands of people died in Bosnia before Bill Clinton got it
right in Kosovo. A lot of elderly hospital and nursing home patients died in
New
Orleans before W. could pay attention to Houston and Galveston.

On Wednesday, Stormy tried to make one of his strained linkages, this time
with Katrina and terror. The terrorists, he said, were "the kind of people
who
look at Katrina and wish they had caused it," while he is the kind of person
who looks at Katrina and tries to energize himself to deal with natural
disasters
by thinking, What if this had been done by terrorists?

On Thursday, he tried to move past the image he had projected of a lost boy
wandering alone in the storm, and stood at the Pentagon flanked by his war
council,
talking about how he was moving to "develop a secure, safe democracy in
Iraq." Unfortunately, the Saudi foreign minister was in town dropping a
bomblet
by saying that Iraq was going down the tubes, a judgment other Sunni Arab
leaders had been conveying privately.

After his Pentagon remarks, W. looked at his vice president for approval and
received a proud, avuncular smile that said, "You're the Man."

But before he chases any more wind tunnels, Stormy should heed the Bob Dylan
line: "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."

Posted by Miriam V.