Could be that the President has an old-school sense of responsbility about keeping live intel a secret.
Could be, but I'm not going to pretend it is just about maintaining secrets. President Bush and his strategists are masters in some ways though they still suffer from the same plague of most who work in DC in that they sometimes forget that Washington is not a bubble. The mess with the hurricanes and giving too much ground in the debate on Iraq are good examples of slip ups but generally the White house has a big picture view of what is going on and instead of responding like reactionaries they tend to give ground only after it is well laid with political landmines and the Democrats behaving in the same way they approach policy march right in shooting their emotional and political guns in the air while appearing more like some foreign army rather than those who wish to be elected to represent US interests.