BY RICHARD SISK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

Monday, December 29th 2008, 11:18 PM

Watson/Getty/AFP/Getty Images

A former aide to Colin Powell called President George W. Bush, a 'Sarah Palin-like' light-weight as a political leader.

WASHINGTON - Former administration underlings depict President Bush as a "Sarah Palin-like" leader with a short attention span who deferred on big decisions.

Larry Wilkerson, a top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, said Vice President Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld promoted the notion they were a national security "dream team" to guide the foreign-policy amateur Bush.

"It allowed everybody to believe that this Sarah Palin-like President - because, let's face it, that's what he was - was going to be protected by this national security elite, tested in the cauldrons of fire," said Wilkerson.

Wilkerson, who is still furious Powell was given faulty intelligence to back the Iraq invasion, was among a group of former Bush aides and foreign officials cited in an "oral history" of the administration in Vanity Fair magazine.

Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism adviser, said then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Steve Hadley, told him, "Don't give the President a lot of long memos. He's not a big reader."

Said an astounded Clarke: "Well, s---, I mean, the President of the United States is not a big reader?"

Former Bush media adviser Mark McKinnon said the administration was in trouble even before taking office in the aftermath of the 2000 recount in which the Supreme Court effectively ruled that Bush had won Florida.

"The recount poisoned the well from the beginning," McKinnon said.

"A good number of people in this country didn't believe Bush was a legitimate President. And you can't change the tone under those circumstances."