President Obama’s former adviser David Axelrod is quoted as explaining Obama’s chronic emergency-response failure thusly: “There’s no doubt that there’s a theatrical nature to the presidency that he resists. Sometimes he can be negligent in the symbolism.” I don’t buy it.

The candidate who modeled his presidency on Abraham Lincoln, who accepted the Democratic nomination in Denver beside Greek columns and who ran on “Hope and Change” knows a thing or two about theatrics and symbolism. Axelrod would have us believe Obama is just too smart and too methodical for his own good. (“He responds in a very rational way, trying to gather facts, rely on the best expert advice, and mobilize the necessary resources.”) Oh, puleez.

Let’s look at three other explanations that correspond to reality.

First, Obama has surrounded himself with sycophants who won’t tell him he is wrong. As Ron Fournier pointed out, “What of the two advisers without a specific portfolio: Valerie Jarrett and Dan Pfeiffer? They’re blindly loyal to Obama, gatherers of power, shielded from blame, and accountable to nobody but the president. Their biggest admirers acknowledge privately that Obama won’t change course unless Jarrett and Pfeiffer change work addresses.” If you don’t know trouble is coming, your closest aides say reaction is just carping from Republicans and you have an exaggerated sense of your own skills, you tend not to expect trouble or take it seriously when it comes.

Second, as Joshua Green points out, Obama’s ideology leads to crises and keeps them from being solved expeditiously. “It didn’t require extraordinary foresight to anticipate the public freakout once the [Ebola] infection spread beyond [Thomas Eric] Duncan. Obama, who’s better acquainted with Washington dysfunction than anybody, should have anticipated the partisan acrimony. The crisis required more of him than he seemed to recognize. But he was hampered by the same things that have plagued him all along: a liberal technocrat’s excess of faith in government’s ability to solve problems and an unwillingness or inability to demonstrate the forcefulness Americans expect of their president in an emergency.” The guy loves government, and when it fails, he is at a loss. Likewise on foreign policy, Obama’s excessive belief in “soft power” leads him to ignore sage advice, make moves that signal weakness and react with amazement when things go wrong. In short, he is a prisoner of liberal ideology that doesn’t work in the real world and therefore he does not assess risks, make adjustments or see the world for what it is.

And lastly, he can’t stand to be associated with failure. He blames the Iraqi government for his troop pullout. He blames the CIA for the Islamic State’s rise. He denies he promised that people could keep their health-care plan. It is a long list of excuses and blame casting. He reflects on problems (inequality, poverty, anything really) as if someone else had been president for the past six years. In other words, he hides from blame. Hence, we see his refusal to go to the Texas border to see the immigration surge for himself. Much of crisis management is accepting responsibility and laying out the solution; you can’t do that if you deflect blame and don’t have a clue as to what to do when government bureaucracy doesn’t work as designed.

Obviously, it is better from a public relations standpoint to insist that Obama’s staff is competent, he has sound ideas and intellectual flexibility and is courageous in accepting blame — but he just doesn’t do the “theatrics.” The problem is: That isn’t true. Next time we need a president who is prepared for the job, is experienced in problem-solving, is willing to hire smart people and is personally courageous.