What a weird moment in U.S. presidential history.

Hurricane Katrina, a Category 3 storm, had smashed into the Gulf South. People were drowning. And the president of the United States played guitar in San Diego, egged on by country singer Mark Wills.

Even George W. Bush’s most stalwart supporters cringed at his disconnect from reality. Bush, like Michael Jackson in his days at Neverland Ranch, was living in a bubble. By contrast, when Hurricane Betsy had struck the Louisiana coast in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson had immediately flown to New Orleans to see the flood zone firsthand. The difference was glaring. Bush was, quite simply—as Coast Guard first-responder Jimmy Duckworth phrased it—“out of the game.”

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On the 10th anniversary of Katrina, with the advantage of hindsight, it’s clear that Bush’s lack of leadership in late summer of 2005 cost his presidency mightily. Unlike Ronald Reagan, after the Challenger explosion, or Bill Clinton, after the Oklahoma City bombing, Bush had failed to feel the profound implications of the moment as his predecessors had. He didn’t scramble into action. He didn’t touch the nation’s heartstrings by using epic oratory to inform the disaster. What we got, instead, were guitar chords and terse speeches void of human pathos. No matter how the Bush library in Dallas tries to spin Bush’s Katrina performance, we all know he deserved an F in crisis management.

The typical president tends to loom as a patriarchal figure. We think of Washington, surely, but also of Obama, gone gray with worry about the state of the nation. But Bush—a private man by nature—was never a particularly accessible president or an outwardly sensitive one. He conducted himself in a remote and undemonstrative way, divulging drips of information to the press only when absolutely necessary. When he was first elected, in 2000, Bush’s rough-and-ready demeanor had a Harry Truman cast. And many Americans were attracted to his central Texas swagger. They enjoyed seeing him drive a Ford F-250. Or clear brush, his Scottish terrier, Barney, at his side. But as Katrina showed, he often waited before taking on the role—to use his preferred term—of “the decider.”

After the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, Bush was virtually unseen during the first 11 hours, making only brief statements and effectively ceding the public leadership role in the crisis to New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani. When the president emerged, addressing the nation in a formal televised speech, it was in a role in which he was comfortable: the aggressor intent on taking revenge against al-Qaeda, against the Taliban who had harbored them, and against “the people who knocked these buildings down” (as he said, a few days after the attacks, bullhorn in hand, at Ground Zero). But soon enough, he was going after Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, whose regime had absolutely zero to do with the 9/11 attacks. Foreign policy and military strategy were not George Bush’s fortes. Within two years, he charged into the headwinds of a war that cost billions, decimated cities, claimed the lives of thousands of allied service members and hundreds of thousands of citizens and enemy combatants—the ramifications of which we are still confronting, in horrific ways, to this day.

Despite this ill-conceived pivot toward Iraq even as al-Qaeda was still a major threat, the voters of America, in 2004, stood behind their commander in chief. In the general election that year, the president, as often happens during wartime, was reelected handily.

But then, nine months later, came a Category 3 hurricane, an enemy that offers no target for revenge, no weapons stockpiles to bomb. What was demanded of the president, essentially, was to oversee the logistics of a national rescue-and-relief operation. In the gloomy hours and days after Katrina and the subsequent deluge, the Gulf South region—and the United States as a whole—needed both decisiveness and compassion. The president had an obligation to call in the 82nd Airborne Division immediately. And he had ample precedent to take on his role as mourner-in-chief.

By JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images.

Instead, Bush acted as though he were disinterested in the natural disaster. More than any other event of his White House tenure, Bush’s slow response to Katrina made Americans ask if he was a “bunker” commander, relying too much on cautious paper pushers such as FEMA’s Michael Brown and Homeland Security’s Michael Chertoff. In the immediate aftermath of the storm and its carnage, the president, who was able to find his sea legs the week of 9/11, couldn’t find his gut, much less his heart. Chertoff, for one, acted as if New Orleans wasn’t actually flooding and, instead, went to an avian flu conference in Atlanta. Brown, in over his head, dithered. Bush should have fired both men. Bush, furthermore, embarrassed himself by flying down to the Gulf and claiming that “Brownie” was doing “a heck of a job.” Just as New Orleans’s levee system catastrophically failed to work (breaking in about 50 places) Bush had catastrophically failed to save lives.

Bush’s incompetence was ultimately responsible for the ineffective federal response from August 29 to September 2. The White House should have moved mountains to help New Orleanians in need. Instead, Bush monitored developments mostly from afar. The national media rightly ripped into Bush like never before. Accordingly, his approval rating sank to the lowest level since he had taken office. (On September 8, a Zogby poll had him at 41 percent.) Politically, Bush was wounded, never to fully recover, his standing made all the worse as the economy tanked in 2008.

The biggest mistake of all was one of optics. Bush chose to fly over New Orleans in Air Force One instead of doing an on-the-ground inspection—a clear sign of aloofness, indeed, of fear. The photo-op of the man in charge staring out the window of his plane was disastrous. No one expected the president to go to the Lower Ninth Ward and pull people out of houses. But making a detour above the disaster zone was the sight of a man slumming, a man in a bubble, a man deluged.

Douglas Brinkley is a Vanity Fair contributor, presidential historian, professor at Rice University, and former longtime resident of New Orleans. He is the author of the 2006 book The Great Deluge.