Who's in charge? How the president passes the buck.

Is President George W. Bush the leader of our government, or is he just a right-wing talk-show host? The question came to mind after his March 21 news conference, during which he sounded like someone who has no control over the government he leads. His words were those of a pundit inveighing against the evils of bureaucrats.

"Obviously," said the critic in chief, "there are some times when government bureaucracies haven't responded the way we wanted them to, and like citizens, you know, I don't like that at all." Yes, and if the president can't do something about it, who can?

Bush went on: "I think, for example, of the trailers sitting down in Arkansas. Like many citizens, I'm wondering why they're down there, you know. How come we've got eleven thousand?" The president was talking about 10,777 mobile homes ordered up to provide housing for the victims of Katrina. As Congressman Mike Ross (D-Ark.) put it in an interview, most of these "brand-new, fully furnished homes are sitting in a hay meadow in Hope, Arkansas," and are "a symbol of what's wrong with this administration and what's wrong with FEMA."

Ross, whose district includes that hay meadow, has been running a one-man crusade since last year to get the homes moved to where they could actually provide shelter for those left homeless by the storm. FEMA let the homes sit there because its regulations don't permit the use of such structures in a flood plain.

That raises at least two questions: Why did FEMA spend anywhere from $300 million to $430 million--the numbers are in dispute--to buy homes that didn't meet its own regulations? Why can't FEMA alter its regulations, at least temporarily, to use the homes where they are desperately needed?

Nearly three months after Ross first complained about the homes sitting in the field--and nearly six weeks after Fox News reported the story and CNN broadcast an extensive account--President Bush seemed perplexed. He insisted that he was asking Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to get to the bottom of the deal. "So I've asked Chertoff to find out," Bush said. "What are you going to do with them? The taxpayers aren't interested in eleven thousand trailers just sitting there. Do something with them. And so I share that sense of frustration when a big government is unable to, you know--it sends wrong signals to taxpayers. But our people are good, hardworking people."

Hold on: The president runs the "big government" he's attacking. If the "good, hard-working people" in his administration aren't responsible for the problem, then the villains of the piece must be alien creatures engendered by some strange beast called Big Government.

Three hundred of the mobile homes were finally moved in February, and five thousand are supposed to be moved to Katrina victims soon. That still leaves a lot of homes. FEMA has said the remainder will be stored for future disasters.

This episode is representative of a corrosive style of politics. Bush and many of his fellow Republicans have won many elections over the years by running against Big Government. They are so much in the habit of trashing government that even when they are in charge of things (Republicans have controlled the White House and both houses of Congress for all but eighteen months since 2001), they pretend they are not. And when their own government fails, they turn around and use their incompetence to argue that government can never work anyway. It's an ideological Catch-22. Even their failures prove they are right.

On the same day the president was pushing off accountability, another politician was giving his voters some very bad news--and taking responsibility for fixing the problem. Governor Jon Corzine of New Jersey announced that his state's fiscal situation was a mess and he proposed a budget that simultaneously raised taxes, cut programs, and walked away from some of his own campaign promises. "New Jerseyans believe that telling the truth is always better than hiding from it, even when it hurts," Corzine, a Democrat, said. "And boy, does this budget hurt."

I'll leave it to New Jersey's budget experts to parse the details of Corzine's fiscal plan. But it's definitely bracing when a politician skips all the rhetoric about big or small government and just tries to fix the thing.

[c] 2006, Washington Post Writers Group