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Bush a disengaged person: ex-aide

By Sridhar Krishnaswami

WASHINGTON, JAN. 10. In stinging observations that could come to haunt the White House in an election year, the former Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O'Neill, has said that the President, George W Bush, was so disengaged in Cabinet meetings that he was like a "blind man in a roomful of deaf people".

Mr. O'Neill was quietly eased out of his job more than a year ago for not being a so-called team player; and is now giving his side of the story in the first two years of the Republican administration.

He was replaced in November 2002 in a shake up of the administration's economic team and at a time when the President was looking for someone to aggressively push a new round of tax cuts. He questioned the need for cuts in the face of growing budget deficits.

The book titled The Price of Loyalty is supposed to deal with several substantive issues including the current state of the political process but is believed to be quite devastating on Mr. Bush who is said to come off as being quite disengaged; one who did not encourage debates in Cabinet meetings; or indulged in conversations in one-on-one meetings.

The former senior Cabinet official is also said to have taken the position that the Bush administration's decision making process was flawed in that senior officials had no clue as to what Mr. Bush wanted forcing actions based on `hunches' on what he "might think".

The book will be hitting the stands early next week and Mr. O'Neill has signed on to do a programme with CBS' Sixty Minutes this Sunday.

On his first meeting with Mr. Bush, Mr. O'Neill has said that he wanted to talk to Mr. Bush about a number of things, but it did not quite work out that way.

"I went in with a long list of things to talk about and I thought to engage (Mr. Bush) on... I was surprised it turned out me talking and the President just listening. It was mostly a monologue."

The book is written by a former reporter of The Wall Street Journal who, according to the CBS, has relied on not only interviews with Mr. O'Neill, but also some 19,000 documents provided by him and in interviews of dozens of insiders with a view to coming to terms with how exactly the first two years of the Republican administration was.

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