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President Bush's Rose Garden speech on Wednesday, promising hurricane-shocked Americans, "We're going to succeed," was a skimpy counterweight to a disaster story line that threatened to swamp him.

The president's nine-minute enumeration of federal help for victims of Katrina -- including release of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve -- carried the whiff of bureaucracy still assembling its clipboards. The New York Times condemned Bush's talk as "one of the worst speeches of his life" and said that his appearance "a day later than he was needed ... seems to be a ritual in this administration." Bush was forced to speak about what would be coming to survivors. But the television cameras were three days ahead of him.

Journalists who waded through the carnage in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama depicted a catastrophe made more dire because local, state, and federal responders were overwhelmed. CNN's Anderson Cooper, fresh from reporting on famine in Africa, conducted a testy interview from Mississippi with the bleary-eyed director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and challenged him to explain why air-drops of food and water had not arrived.

Fox News Network's reporter, with microphone in hand on a New Orleans overpass, kept the cameras rolling as his crew flagged down a police officer and pleaded with him to drive a visibly exhausted mother and her feverish five-day-old infant to medical aid. The FNN correspondent told a somber Brit Hume at the anchor desk that rescuers had plucked the pair from flooded public housing and simply deposited them on the chaotic roadway, with no water, transportation, or advice about where to go. And that mother and child were among thousands.

By Thursday, the White House press corps pounded press secretary Scott McClellan to explain why the federal response to the dire hardships of hundreds of thousands of Americans came late and appeared poorly planned. McClellan disputed such assertions.

For U.S. presidents, there is an unwritten rule book for disaster recovery, and the first rule is, "Act fast." The second rule is, "Send it all," because local and state officials are often reluctant to admit they need help. And the third rule is that presidents are expected to "explain and console." President Clinton and his FEMA director, James Lee Witt, were acknowledged masters. It was George H.W. Bush, with Hurricanes Hugo in 1989 and Andrew in 1992, who provided painful lessons about the feds' bureaucratic intransigence and deference to local officials.

"President Clinton learned what happened and never let it happen again," recalled Marlin Fitzwater, former press secretary to Presidents Bush and Reagan. "And the good part is that they learned it for all time and for all the presidents."

The senior President Bush was not callous to disasters: A severe storm in 1991 gutted his family home in Maine, and the Atlantic swallowed its contents. But he failed to anticipate that his administration was part of the problem. FEMA had been criticized for a sluggish response after Hugo, which struck the Carolinas and claimed 86 lives. By the time Andrew destroyed more than 100,000 Florida homes two months before the 1992 election, the vulnerabilities of FEMA (which at the time required governors to first request aid) conspired with the shortsightedness of Florida's Gov. Lawton Chiles (who initially refused to make the request) to give Bush a black eye.

Fitzwater said that Clinton rightly went to school on Bush's mistakes. "He, as president, could not afford to wait on governors to develop the response and to make the requests," Fitzwater said. "If you waited a day or two or three, you were too late. You have to get on the ground immediately -- and not with checks, but with tents and with food and water."

To deliver resources through heftier departments such as Defense, FEMA must seize the president's attention before disasters happen, said Jane Bullock, who worked at FEMA under five presidents before becoming Witt's chief of staff. Clinton -- who experienced natural calamities during a dozen years as governor of a small, poor state -- "recognized that people expected their government to be there in a disaster," she said.

When government help proves a balm for victims, it can also be a balm for presidents. With his poll numbers at their lowest ebb, the current President Bush has been playing defense. "Every time we had a disaster, President Clinton's poll numbers went up," Bullock added. "They gave him a venue where he was at his best."

COMMENTS

• The mismanagement by multiple officials is our collective lack of fortune as a a country. Because we as U.S. citizens elected the majority of the leaders who are handling the Katrina disaster, we have to share a part of the responsibility for the less than stellar leadership from some of the government officials in this case. That's why it's so important that when we go to the polls to vote for our leaders we do so based on the best information we have about their true leadership abilities, rather than popularity or just appearing "strong" on the outside. Strength comes from within and shows up in the long-run, and part of strength and true confidence is admitting one's mistakes. Another Citizen and Government worker GovExec.com reader Posted September 12, 2005 9:15 AM
• DHS has the authority to override local and state governments in situations like these. And, considering they knew what was coming and the magnitude of the storm, they should have done so before the storm hit. This administration has had no problem usurping states' rights in the past (case in point, Terri Schaivo) so why couldn't they have done it for New Orleans? Bush was too busy vacationing to be bothered. GovExec.com reader Posted September 9, 2005 6:52 AM
• Whatever happened to accountability at the local level? When the heads start rolling, the Mayor of New Orleans should be first. He is the one that did not order mandatory evacuation till too late, he is the one that did not roll the school buses and city buses out of the city with the people, now all the buses and many of these same people are lost. Then the governor, it took a phone call from George to make her order an evacuation, and even then it took her two more days to do it. Then lets start with the legislature, how many times have they not put in money to rebuild the levees, but did put in enough pork to build new roads for the new casinos? If the senators and congressman reps really cared about anybody but themselves this problem could have been prevented. Once you clean out that bunch, then start figuring out exactly what went wrong, and if deserved, act accordingly. GovExec.com reader Posted September 7, 2005 7:55 AM