According to Scott McClellan’s press briefing on Monday, the president was not exactly inquisitive about the details when notified that the Vice President had been involved in a shooting accident. As McClellan explained it, two hours after the incident, WH Chief of Staff Andy Card told Bush that an accident had occurred, but there was no mention that Cheney had shot someone. Only later did Bush learn that detail from Karl Rove.
With this in mind, TNR’s Ryan Lizza took a slightly contrarian approach to the shooting controversy today. Lizza confessed he’s not terribly interested in what the story says about Cheney — he’s more concerned about Cheney’s boss.
To me, the emblematic detail of this drama is the fact that it took multiple phone calls and several hours for Bush to find out that his vice president almost killed a man. Bush’s obliviousness is more interesting than Cheney’s bad aim.
Being out of the loop is nothing new for this president. Whenever the public gets a random glimpse into Bush’s private schedule, he seems to be strangely detached from events around him. When a crazy person sprayed the White House grounds with bullets in the middle of the day in 2001, we learned Bush was not working, but working out. When a plane flew into restricted Washington air space in 2005, Bush was biking in the suburbs, clueless about the emergency.
On their own these little examples of Bush being checked out are probably trivial. But they hint at a core deficiency in how he conceives his job.
That’s an interesting point. Two hours after the accidental shooting, the president learned about the incident, but didn’t know about Cheney’s role. Given the circumstances, Bush might have been curious about who shot whom. The most powerful man in the world, with access to a highly sophisticated communications network, the president could have picked up a phone, called Cheney or anyone in his entourage, and asked for some details.
Instead, Card gave Bush a vague description about a shooting involving the VP, and the president essentially said, “Okey doke.”
Lizza argues, persuasively, that this detached, inattentive approach is a symptom of a larger problem.
The irony is that this fear of detail is what has led to Bush’s greatest failures. He didn’t aggressively follow up on the pre-9/11 Presidential Daily Brief that warned “bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.” He was so determined not to second guess his generals that he watched from the sidelines as their military strategy allowed bin Laden to escape from Tora Bora.
The Abu Ghraib prison scandal spread out of control without presidential intervention. And as the damning report to be released today on Hurricane Katrina shows, Bush dithered while New Orleans sank. According to The Washington Post, the report notes that “‘earlier presidential involvement could have speeded the response’ because he alone could have cut through all bureaucratic resistance.” But that would have required micro-management instead of delegation.
Granted, there’s a qualitative difference between the president shirking the details about a looming threat and casually awaiting details about a vice presidential shooting. But both point to a similar character trait: Bush just isn’t a curious man.
Lizza describes it as “Bush’s detached MBAism.” But don’t CEOs occasionally ask probing questions?