The NYT acknowledges Obama's in trouble by reminding us that Bush was really, really bad. Remember?!!

At the website front page the teaser headline  — which is also the headline in the paper version — is:  "As Troubles Pile Up, a Crisis of Confidence for Obama." But if you click to the article, the headline becomes "Health Law Rollout’s Stumbles Draw Parallels to Bush’s Hurricane Response."

I can think of a whole bunch of non-parallels:

1. Bush's political party didn't design and enact Hurricane Katrina.

2. Bush didn't have 5 years to craft his response to the hurricane.

3. Bush didn't have the power to redesign the hurricane as he designed his response to it.

4. The Republican Bush believed he could not simply bully past the Democratic Mayor of New Orleans and the Democratic Governor of Louisiana and impose a federal solution, but the Democrat Obama and his party in Congress aggressively and voluntarily took over an area of policy that might have been left to the states.

5. The media were ready to slam Bush long and hard for everything — making big scandals out of things that, done by Obama, would have been forgotten a week later (what are the Valerie Plame-level screwups of Obama's?) — but the media have bent over backwards for years to help make Obama look good and to bury or never even uncover all of his lies and misdeeds.

6. If Bush experienced a disaster like the rollout of Obamacare, the NYT wouldn't use its front page to remind us of something Bill Clinton did that looked bad.

But let's check out the asserted parallels in that NYT article by Michael D. Shear:

The disastrous rollout of his health care law not only threatens the rest of his agenda but also raises questions about his competence in the same way that the Bush administration’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina undermined any semblance of Republican efficiency.

But unlike Mr. Bush, who faced confrontational but occasionally cooperative Democrats, Mr. Obama is battling a Republican opposition that has refused to open the door to any legislative fixes to the health care law and has blocked him at virtually every turn. 

Oh, well, that's another nonparallel. Republicans oppose Obama, unlike those Democrats who sometimes helped Bush. And the NYT reinforces my point #5 (above).

But think about it this way, NYT. What if Bush and the Republicans had created the hurricane, and the Democrats adamantly believed it would be better not to have a hurricane? Would the Democrats have been "occasionally cooperative" to Republicans who smugly announced that they won the election and they've been wanting this hurricane for 100 years and canceling the hurricane was not an option?

Republicans readily made the Hurricane Katrina comparison. 

Oh? Note the wording. It doesn't say that important Republicans were bringing up Katrina on their own. I suspect that the journalist, Shear, asked various Republicans to talk about Bush and Katrina and some of them did.

“The echoes to the fall of 2005 are really eerie,” said Peter D. Feaver, a top national security official in Mr. Bush’s second term. “Katrina, which is shorthand for bungled administration policy, matches to the rollout of the website.” 

Okay, so Shear got Feaver to put a name on the assertion that Republicans made the comparison. No other Republican is named. Shear moves on to Obama's "top aides" and tells us — here's my point #5 again —  that they stressed how unlike Katrina it is, since "Mr. Obama is struggling to extend health care to millions of people who do not have it. Those are very different issues."

I agree. The health care screwup isn't a natural disaster. Obama and the Democrats made their own disaster, stepping up to do something they should have known they weren't going to be able to do well, and they lied about what they were doing to get it passed.

And yet they meant well. They wanted to help people. Unlike Bush, who — what? — asked for that hurricane?

ADDED: My point #4, above, draws from this passage in Bush's "Decision Points" (previously blogged here):

If I invoked the Insurrection Act against [Governor Blanco's] wishes, the world would see a male Republican president usurping the authority of a female Democratic governor by declaring an insurrection in a largely African American city. That left me in a tough position. That would arouse controversy anywhere. To do so in the Deep South, where there had been centuries of states' rights tensions, could unleash holy hell.

And the NYT would have framed it that way (which is my point #5).

"Obama unable to govern like he campaigns"... a painfully funny front-page teaser at the L.A. Times...

... takes us to a more-painful-because-they're-serious headline: "Why can't Obama run the government as smoothly as his campaign?" Subhead: "The president increasingly seems to be battling top-level management failures as much as policy or political problems, observers say."

Remember when Obama, running for President in 2008, was asked what executive experience he had and he said running his campaign was executive experience?

Well, you know, my understanding is, is that Governor Palin's town of Wasilla has, I think, 50 employees. We have got 2,500 in this campaign. I think their budget is maybe $12 million a year. You know, we have a budget of about three times that just for the month. So, I think that our ability to manage large systems and to execute, I think, has been made clear over the last couple of years. And, certainly, in terms of the legislation that I passed just dealing with this issue post-Katrina of how we handle emergency management, the fact that many of my recommendations were adopted and are being put in place as we speak, I think, indicates the degree to which we can provide the kinds of support and good service that the American people expect.

Manage large systems... provide the kinds of support and good service that the American people expect.... 

Back to the L.A. Times:

As a candidate, he vowed to restore government competence to earn back trust, and to make a case for expanding the government's role in people's lives.

"We simply cannot afford to perpetuate a system in Washington where politicians and bureaucrats make decisions behind closed doors, with little accountability for the consequences … and where outdated technology and information systems undermine efficiency, threaten our security and fail to serve an engaged citizenry," Obama said in 2009...

"It seems to be that this White House has no chain to the top, even just the conventional 'protect the boss' standard that ought to be in place everywhere," [said Bob Stone, project director of the Clinton-era government reform effort]. "When something is about to burst, you warn the boss. That's both a management issue and a political issue.... It's hard to see that the president has really had any interest in actually managing the government."

Sympathy for the euthanists.

Sherri Fink's "5 Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital" looks like a great book, based on the description in this NYT review. It appears to be an exciting and subtle account of what happened in an ICU at a hospital after Hurricane Katrina knocked out the power and delayed evacuation for 5 days. A doctor and 2 nurses were arrested for murder, based on the high levels of morphine and other drugs in the bodies of 20 of the 45 patients who died, but the grand jury did not indict them. 

Dr. Fink maintains a reporter’s detachment.... In following the machinations of a central witness — Dr. Frank Minyard, the city coroner, a colorful politician.... Dr. Fink shifts her focus from the horrific conditions in Memorial to considerations of justice. She gives proportional weight to Virginia Rider, a state investigator of Medicare fraud tasked with gathering evidence on the hospital deaths.

“Growing up in a state where politicians exploited every opportunity for corruption, she had deposited her faith in the burnished version of the American justice system her teachers had described in school,” Dr. Fink writes of Ms. Rider. “She believed, even to her ripe old early 40s, that good would prevail over evil. She had given so much of herself to this ideal.”

Ms. Rider’s passion may suggest a naïveté about the gray area in moral dynamics when things fall apart, but her confrontation with Dr. Minyard, after the grand jury refuses to indict, is a stunning scene. Dr. Fink does not condemn those Ms. Rider deemed guilty. But by reporting the depth of those gruesome hours in Memorial before the helicopters came, and giving weight to medical ethics as grounded in the law, Sheri Fink has written an unforgettable story.

Dr. Fink may "maintain a reporter’s detachment," but the reviewer, Jason Berry (author of "Render Unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church") gives off a whiff of enthusiasm for euthanasia. Do you notice? Or is it just me? I'm looking for early symptoms of acceptance of euthanasia, which I believe will creep in as we Baby Boomers become more and more of a burden. Berry stresses Fink's evenhandedness, which makes me want to read the book but makes me suspect he'd prefer more opinion. It's fairly mild to say "may suggest a naïveté about the gray area in moral dynamics when things fall apart," but to my perhaps oversensitive perception, it suggests the opinion that sophisticated minds see — in all that complexity and nuance — a place for euthanasia.

Is charitable giving too emotional?

If you leave it to sentimental humans to determine where the money goes, you end up with a whole lot of guide dogs for the blind. Because: dogs! And: blindness!

And:

“My father gave a lot to religious stuff because he was religious... He was also a bleeding heart.” She recalled him crying as he watched the nightly news and then making a donation to a charity aimed at easing whatever troubling situation he had seen.

Remember all the money given to help the dogs seen in the news coverage after Hurricane Katrina?

Highlights from the Bush interview: "I'll be dead... our afterlife... assiduously."

I'm watching John King's interview with George and Laura Bush (on the occasion of the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum).

GEORGE BUSH: History will ultimately judge the decisions that were made for Iraq. And I'm just not going to be around to see the final verdict.

KING: Not going to be around. That's an interesting way to put it. You...

GEORGE BUSH (laughing): In other words, I'll be dead....

I don't know why King acted puzzled over the phrase "I'm just not going to be around," but it was hilarious when Bush clarified the term. Lightheartedness at the idea of one's own death is disarming, and coming after King's strange confusion, it made us laugh. Perhaps King was hoping to draw Bush into some deeper contemplation of death. That didn't happen. We get a glimpse of Bush's social skill.

Having said so bluntly "I'll be dead," it was striking when Bush proceeded to refer to the post-presidency period as the "afterlife."

GEORGE BUSH: Democracies take time to evolve. Laura and I believe that women will help lead the democracy movements in these young democracies. And part of our afterlife will be to enable and empower women....

What amused me more than anything else was the one time in the interview when Bush whipped out a higher level vocabulary word. It sticks out, because it's something he almost entirely avoids. In this, he's so different from Obama, whose speaking style feels like the result of a lifetime of positive reinforcement for talking like a professor. Bush was addressing the problem dealing with Katrina, in our system of federalism which places primary responsibility on the state governor.

GEORGE BUSH: ... And the role of the federal government's to be supportive. In this case, the natural disaster was so overwhelming, and the infrastructure was so overwhelmed that I had a tough choice to make. And people would just learn the facts. See, that's all I care about, and that's what I wrote in my book which I'm sure you assiduously studied.

Laura laughs. "Assiduously" is there as a joke, and if you listen to the interview, you'll hear a lot of humor in the way he says it.

And let me throw in the next interchange, about the one way Bush could have moved control to the federal level:

KING: You talk about... the idea that you have a southern governor, a woman governor in a state with a large African-American population. A former governor yourself. And people were telling you, Mr. President, maybe you need to declare an insurrection.

GEORGE BUSH: Insurrection, which would have been pretty difficult. Not pretty difficult. Very difficult. Yeah, so it points out the dilemma.

KING: Do you wish in hindsight you had done it?

GEORGE BUSH: No. Not really. There's no telling how history would have recorded the situation, had I declared insurrection. I can tell you that the decibel level would have risen even louder than it was.

Notice how gently he refers to the vicious criticism he had to deal with. He doesn't say people were awfully cruel to him, which they were. He mentions "the decibel level," and that's only after his stock answer for almost everything: History will judge. And he wants the American people to think and learn. That's the idea of the library, which he refocuses on:

GEORGE BUSH: The point is, is that it -- this helps Americans understand the decisions that I made during a massive storm. But also points out that — the dilemmas that presidents face. Not just me but every president who’s got a series of conflicting advisers. And you've just got to pick and make the best judgment call you can. And hopefully, people will go to the Decision Point Theater and say, "Wow, I didn't understand that" or "I now understand it better." And it's interesting to me, they say, of how a president makes decisions, and hopefully it will help them make better decisions.

There's something very sweet and modest about the expression of hope that visitors to the library will be helped in their own lives as they go about making personal decisions.