The natural instinct of any administration is to circle the wagons when hit with the sort of criticism buffeting the White House over the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina.
President Bush is probably even more resistant than most of his predecessors to admitting error or reexamining decisions.
This is a man, after all, who once famously blanked at a news conference when asked to identify his biggest post-9/11 mistake, and who later draped the nation's highest civilian honor on the CIA director who told him that the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a "slam dunk."
All of this helps explain why White House and Department of Homeland Security officials initially insisted last week that they had done everything they could, as quickly as they could, to help those in need in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast.
But the national interest demands that the president now rise above that defensive crouch. After a week of despair, suffering and terrifying chaos in New Orleans, this is a moment for the president to be knocking heads, demanding answers and imposing changes throughout the federal government. It was an encouraging, if modest, start Friday when Bush acknowledged the results of the relief effort were "not acceptable."
But the president quickly diluted that message when he added that he was "satisfied with the response," if not the conditions on the ground. Rather than mincing words about Washington's performance, the president should be the first one asking questions -- in public and in private.
If it wasn't so tragic, it might be ironic that New Orleans has been submerged into misery as the nation prepares to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Government at all levels has spent billions of dollars since 2001 to prepare for another catastrophe. The national security bureaucracy has undergone the largest reorganization since World War II with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. The president has repeatedly declared the nation on war footing.
And then, as many as three and four days after the levees burst around New Orleans, survivors were stepping around bodies in the street and officials at one hospital were moving patients to upper floors because the lower levels had been lost to looters prowling the halls.
