This, from a fellow republican, who also was a Cabinet member:

Former Treasury secretary O'Neill: Bush was like a `blind man in a
roomful of deaf people'

MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics Writer Friday, January 9, 2004

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(01-09) 11:12 PST WASHINGTON (AP) --

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, pushed out of the
administration for not being a team player, says President Bush was so
disengaged during Cabinet meetings that he was like a "blind man in a
roomful of deaf people."

O'Neill, who has kept silent about the circumstances surrounding his
ouster from the Cabinet 13 months ago, is now ready to give his side
of the story with a tell-all book that paints Bush as a disengaged
president who didn't encourage debate either at Cabinet meetings or in
one-on-one meetings with his Cabinet secretaries.

To promote the book which will be out Tuesday, O'Neill was appearing
Sunday on CBS's "60 Minutes" in an interview with correspondent Lesley
Stahl.

In an excerpt released by CBS, O'Neill said that a lack of real
dialogue characterized the Cabinet meetings he attended during the
first two years of the administration and gave O'Neill the feeling
that Bush "was like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people."

O'Neill said that the atmosphere was similar during the one-on-one
meetings he held with Bush.

Speaking of his first meeting with the president, O'Neill said, "I
went in with a long list of things to talk about and, I thought, to
engage (Bush) on. ... I was surprised it turned out me talking and the
president just listening. It was mostly a monologue."

O'Neill is described as the principal source for the new book, "The
Price of Loyalty," being published by Simon and Schuster, and written
by Ron Suskind, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal.

In addition to interviews with O'Neill, Suskind drew on 19,000
documents O'Neill provided, according to CBS, which said Suskind also
interviewed dozens of Bush insiders to flesh out his account of the
administration's first two years.

Asked about O'Neill's comment about a disengaged president, White
House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters Friday, "I think it's
well known the way the president approaches governing and setting
priorities. The president is someone that leads and acts decisively on
our biggest priorities and that is exactly what he'll continue to do."

Asked about the administration's opinion of the upcoming book,
McClellan said, "I don't do book reviews."

O'Neill, the former head of aluminum giant Alcoa, did not immediately
respond to phone messages from The AP left at his office in
Pittsburgh. But in an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,
O'Neill said he hoped his inflammatory comments did not overshadow the
substantive issues he discusses in the book.

"If the 'red meat,' taken out of context, is all that people get out
of this book, it will be a huge disappointment to me," he said.
"Ideally, this book will cause people to stop and think about the
current state of our political process and raise our expectations for
what is possible."

O'Neill gained a reputation during his two years in the Bush Cabinet
for frequently shooting from the lip with incendiary comments that
shook up financial markets and antagonized Wall Street. O'Neill said
he was just trying to discuss complicated public policy issues in
greater depth than the television sound bites so often used by the
typical Washington politicians.

O'Neill was fired in December 2002 when Bush shook up his economic
team in search of better salesmen for a new round of tax cuts the
president hoped would stimulate a sluggish economy.

O'Neill had publicly questioned the need for another round of tax cuts
in light of the growing budget deficits. He was replaced by John Snow,
former head of CSX Corp., who became a staunch advocate for new tax
cuts, which Bush signed into law in May.