Does the White House Now Have a Discipline Problem?

I noted in my previous post how puzzled I was by the White House's shockingly amateur political response to Hurricane Katrina. Never before had I seen this White House demonstrate such political tone deafness. Now it seems that another hallmark of the Bush Administration--its famous tight-lipped discipline -- has also suddenly gone AWOL. In a rather extraordinary article, TIME magazine's Mike Allen paints a particularly unflattering portrait of the President's leadership style, and he uses anonymous sources from within the White House to do it. While I recommend reading the entire piece, pay particular attention to the following passages:

Longtime Bush watchers say they are not
shocked that he missed his moment—one of
his most trusted confidants calls him "a better
third- and fourth-quarter player," who focuses and
delivers when he sees the stakes. What surprised
them was that he still appeared to be stutter-stepping
in the second week of the crisis, struggling to make
up for past lapses instead of taking control with a
grand gesture.

Just as Katrina exposed the lurking problems
of race and poverty, it also revealed the limitations
of Bush's rigid, top-down approach to the presidency.
"The extremely highly centralized control of the
government—the engine of Bush's success—failed
him this time," a key adviser said.

Later Allen writes:

A related factor, aides and outside allies concede,
is what many of them see as the President's increasing
isolation. Bush's bubble has grown more hermetic in
the second term, they say, with fewer people willing or
able to bring him bad news—or tell him when he's wrong.

Bush has never been adroit about this. 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."

And finally:

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. For example, a source tells
TIME that four days after Katrina struck, Bush himself
briefed his father and former President Clinton in a way
that left too rosy an impression of the progress made.
"It bore no resemblance to what was actually happening,"
said someone familiar with the presentation.

Remarkable, isn't it? As the media scribes over at The Note point out, "[t]hese blind quotes contain information from conversations with the President that reflects badly on him — something that rarely happens in this White House and something this President can't stand." While the source from the final passage might be someone in Clinton's camp (perhaps even Clinton himself), the rest of the sources Allen cites appear to be Bush's own friends and aides. One is described as a "key adviser." If Bush has read Allen's piece, he must be livid.

So what's happened to that famous loyalty and discipline that we've come to expect from Bush's White House? Why are his aides suddenly so talkative (and so badly off-message)? I have no idea. Nor can I explain how this White House could have failed to understand the significance of a natural disaster of this magnitude. We'll just have to wait and see whether this was a momentary lapse or a complete derailment.