The grisliest quote of the week, the one to cut out and keep, came when reporters asked Lea Anne McBride what her boss was doing as New Orleans sank, stank and suppurated. "He's working from Wyoming today," said Vice-President Dick Cheney's official spokesman brightly. At which point - against all odds - you began to feel slightly sorry for George Bush.No one with any semblance of rationality can pretend that Bush carries personal blame for the debacle of New Orleans. He didn't personally go through the fine print of recent budgets and strike out the item marked "Levees, strengthening of". He didn't personally choose the federal emergency mastermind for such crises (a former selector of horse-show judges). As a notoriously light reader, he clearly never clapped eyes on commodious newspaper and official warnings of hurricane wrath to come.The president was on holiday, as usual, when Katrina roared in from the Gulf of Mexico last Monday. Perhaps he took the first TV reports - that New Orleans had missed the worst - as gospel, and went for a jog. Perhaps his staff didn't want to wake him. The mythology of "commander-in-chief" and the reality were starkly separated again. It's foolish to dump everything (including the historic woes and racial divisions of a city born to sing the blues) on poor George alone.Leaders of great nations facing great trouble depend on the team and the professionalism around them. Tony Blair didn't jet back from his winter break by the Red Sea when the tsunami struck. He left John Prescott to handle the meetings and Whitehall's machine to handle the detail.He knows that, apart from a few ceremonial appearances in 7/7 mode, it doesn't matter whether he's there or not when true disaster strikes. You can't invent a functioning bureaucracy overnight. You can't hand-deliver tonnes of bottled water to the thirsty yourself. The thing is either organised, long since organised - or it's not. So back to Wyoming.Nobody, in the late 90s when the Republican party searched for a standard-bearer, turned to Bush for his magnificent managerial skills. He'd part-owned a baseball team and part-superintended a small, struggling oil company, but his only relevant job had been governor of Texas. He was chosen as folksy symbol, heir to a dynasty, born-again communicator: and he fitted that bill well enough.But fine detail and hard grind? No way. This was where Cheney came in: a vice-president apart, deeply experienced runner of defence departments, congressional offices and giant corporations. He'd handle the tough stuff while George did front of house. The rarely posed question in the fifth year of this administration is: whatever happened to that neat division of labour?You can, to be sure, trace many of Team Bush's woes - especially the decision to take on Saddam - to an ideology that couldn't stand practical scrutiny. You can certainly trace much of the antipathy towards the president, domestic and international, to his policies and the way he presents them. But the dreadful lesson of New Orleans has very little to do with rhetorical postures. It is the problem of delivery that keeps letting America down.Look at the prelude to 9/11 - where ever more damning details of bureaucratic blindness and non-cooperation still surface - and the failure to head off al-Qaida's amateurish attacks was a shambles. Look at the intelligence tangle before Iraq - and the massive post-invasion decisions (like disbanding the Iraqi army) that have wrecked bold hopes ever since. More shambles from bureaucrat Bremer. Look at the Baghdad taps that don't flow to this day and the electricity that goes off and on. Look at the Big Uneasy.Of course, the cock-up theory of history dogs every jot of administrative life, from Stockwell tube station on. Of course, we have our own child support agencies and similar shames. And, of course, Whitehall probably wouldn't function too smoothly under six feet of water if the Thames barrier burst. Yet there is, from administration to administration, a problem here that is more than politics, vituperation and blame.America, for all its wealth and thirst for economic change, is a stagnant pond for constitutional reformers. Nothing fundamental changes much in the byzantine division of responsibilities between city, state and federal government - except that the states grow gradually more feeble as giant agencies come and go.Cheney, a supposed foe of bureaucracy, has steered his pupil in weird directions here - including the creation of a monstrous homeland security department, run by counter-terrorist hands, that has all but swallowed up poor Fema, the designated disasters agency. Would a dirty bomb in Bourbon Street have been better handled? Maybe. But dirty water was nowhere on Washington's radar.Put accusations of racial prejudice and callousness, however vehement, to one side for a moment and concentrate on the main event: a machine that didn't work when the waves swept in. The charge that lingers most acridly is one of incompetence, inertia, incapacity; and the means of putting that right stretch far beyond a few sackings and shufflings.Blame Bush? Naturally. This shambles is on his watch. But don't fail to ask the more difficult questions either. Does free-market scorn for public services and its salary structure make for third-rate public servants? Do election-related democratic upheavals of administrative tenure every four years bring expertise or confusion? Does our solitary superpower boast a superpowered administrative engine - or an old banger in need of total refurbishment? Don't ask poor George. This isn't his bag. But what about working it through one fine day in Wyoming?