OUR CEO PRESIDENT

Josh Marshall has some of his usual excellent insights into our "CEO president":

From this exchange, the president seemed unaware of what the report even was and claimed to believe that he somehow couldn't get a hold of it until it came up through the chain of command.

The point here isn't that the president is stupid, but that he seems blithely indifferent to what is a huge setback to American goals and standing in the Middle East and indeed throughout the world.

There's an echo here of his response to the pre-9/11 warnings streaming up through the government bureaucracy. It hasn't landed on his desk yet, with an action plan, so what is he supposed to do? He talked to Rumsfeld who says he's on top of it. So what more can be done?

This isn't a matter of the aesthetics of leadership. It is another example of how this president is a passive commander-in-chief, how he demands no accountability and, because of that, allows problems to fester and grow. Though this may not be a direct example of it, he also creates a climate tolerant of rule-breaking that seeps down into the ranks of his subordinates, mixing with and reinforcing those other shortcomings.

The disasters now facing the country in Iraq -- some in slow motion, others by quick violence -- aren't just happening on the president's watch. They are happening in a real sense, really in the deepest sense, because of him -- because of his attention to the simulacra of leadership rather than the real thing, which is more difficult and demanding, both personally and morally.

As director of corporate marketing and strategic communications for a Fortune 250 company, I have worked with three different highly effective and successful CEOs over the past 15 years. I can tell you, they weren't passive and they READ every report they could get their hands on. They were always the MOST knowledgeable people in the company. Can you imagine a top-level CEO of a publicly held company making his quarterly conference call to financial analysts and NOT knowing the answer to any of their questions? The Board of Directors would have serious questions about their ability to lead the company, especially after the analysts lowered their stock price expectations on that basis. And believe me, the quality of company leadership has a great deal to do with the confidence the market has in the company. There may not be a lot of checks and balances in corporate America today, but there is still one that is effective -- the market's rating of the company. In Bush's case, I think the rating would have to be "sell" or at least "underperform."