Weekend politics and the fallout

Over the weekend, the weekly news magazines and the top dailies published rather damning accounts of the inside story of the Bush administration's failed response to Katrina. Dan Froomkin's White House Memo from Monday gives a summary of the big stories.

Froomkin also looks at a bigger point: these articles reveal a White House that is incompetent, with Bush himself hardly a decisive leader. But the articles don't just say that Bush was incompetent for this particular disaster -- they present quotes from administration insiders suggesting that this is the norm. Yet usually we don't read about that.

Froomkin: "But for whatever reason, critical observations and insights that for so long have been zealously guarded by mainstream journalists, and only doled out in teaspoons if at all, now seem to be flooding into the public sphere."

He may be jumping a bit to make the assumption that the jouralists are the ones suddenly being more open -- and that it's not just white house staffers suddenly being more open. But presumably he's basing that analysis on his own reporting and knowledge.

Yes, it's reasonable to believe that frusturated staffers are probably being more talkative to the press right now, about Katrina. But it wouldn't make sense that they would suddenly also be criticizing Bush's past performance. At least some of this stuff had to be things that were coming to the press over the past years, yet journalists didn't print them until it suddenly became politically okay to criticize the president.

It will be interesting to see where Tuesday's declaration by Bush that he takes responsibility for the Katrina response will lead. He wouldn't have done it if he didn't have to. They must've thought the situation politically was looking pretty bad. Will this actually help?