Stormy spins in a vortex

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 on 23 September. 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 Geroge 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.

David 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 George 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.

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, Clinton's aides had to beg him to call lawmakers on the Hill to support his own legislative agenda.

Before the Katrina scandal, George 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 George 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 George 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 energise 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, George 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." © New York Times