Can't Win for Losing?

White House aides have apparently been expressing their frustration to members of the press corps, saying President Bush just can't win with them: When he doesn't pay a visit after a disaster, he gets criticized for being heartless; when he does, he get criticized for getting in the way (and wasting gas). Sounds like the White House has a point there, doesn't it?

But it's not that simple. And as is often the case with this White House, the problem is that no one is asking the right questions.

The right question in this case is not whether Bush should or shouldn't visit disaster sites. The right questions are: 1) Does he fully grasp the human tragedy?; and 2) Are his trips helping the recovery or not?

Bush is obviously distressed to some degree by the devastation and the slow government response. Yesterday, he acknowledged that the region is "hurtin'." And two weeks ago, he accepted responsibility for the (unspecified) federal government failures in the wake of Katrina.

But the relative lack of emotion in his remarks raises the possibility that he doesn't fully appreciate the sense of loss experienced by countless thousands of Gulf Coast residents.

And he has yet to express anything like the sense of horror that I think it's safe to say most Americans felt while watching the televised images, day after day, of fellow citizens in desperate need waiting in vain for their government to come to their aid. So the jury's still out on whether he's troubled -- at least as much as the rest of us.

And are his visits helping the recovery? Obviously, they are in large part photo opportunities, meticulously staged to telegraph the image of the president as an involved, caring, hands-on leader -- and in so doing, offset the free-fall in his poll numbers.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that they don't have any other value. Has he, for instance, learned anything on these trips that he's taken to heart? Has he made any decisions based specifically on what he's observed or heard? If so, what are they?

Do residents of the disaster zones in general feel reassured -- or annoyed -- by his visits? And what about the people he meets with? Do they feel inconvenienced and used -- or honored and heartened -- by the presence of the president of the United States? Are they ultimately glad he came? (And are people who wouldn't be so positive kept at bay?) It seems to me those are answerable questions. And we should try to get some of the answers.

Sideshow

Meanwhile, the debate over Bush's post-hurricane conduct has taken a trivial tack. The big scandal: That he's wasting gas.

But that's not a big scandal. That's a sideshow. And even if it makes Bush look a bit hypocritical in light of his new call for energy conservation, White House aides must be delighted to see the previous elements of the debate -- questioning Bush's competence, his leadership, his dismal approval ratings and his shattered second-term agenda -- overshadowed by a much less toxic journalistic obsession.

William Bunch writes in the Philadelphia Daily News: "Just one day after President Bush urged Americans to cut back on needless travel and promised that the federal government would do the same, he boarded Air Force One yesterday for a trip to inspect hurricane damage that will burn through roughly 11,437 gallons of jet fuel, worth about $24,590 at today's record high fuel prices.