I appreciate Mayor David Cicilline’s taking ultimate responsibility yesterday for the fiasco that saw city schoolchildren stranded on buses well into the night during last week’s storm.

But I’d have appreciated it more if he also had accepted more of the blame, if he talked less like a bureaucrat and more like a human being.

That would be asking a lot of someone eying a 2010 run for governor. It’s hard to admit to personal failings. But I think voters appreciate officeholders who can summon the courage to say, “I messed up. I apologize.”

It’s relatively easy, as Democrat Cicilline did, to fire someone and to suspend someone else, just as it was relatively easy for Republican Governor Carcieri to throw someone under the bus for the state government’s inept response to the storm.

A politician hardly is about to announce, “I’m firing myself.” But can’t they do better at acknowledging their own miscues?

Offhand, it sounds like the firing and suspension Cicilline announced at a news conference were appropriate. (Maybe even more heads should have rolled.)

And I was impressed by the series of communications/coordination reforms he unveiled, with a guarantee of avoiding a recurrence of last week’s chaos.

Still, the mayor had problems talking about himself. When asked what last week’s episode said of his ability to manage a city during a crisis, he said there was a systematic breakdown in communications, from the bus company to the School Department and so on, and declared, “What people expect from leaders is when you have in fact identified a problem, fix it.”

I asked, “What failure do you acknowledge? What about your performance?” Again, Cicilline said he accepted ultimate responsibility. So I asked again, “What did you do wrong?”

But he still had trouble with the concept. He said, “The way that an emergency like this is supposed to work is that as people identify what began as a snowstorm and became an emergency, there are people who are charged with actively monitoring that, and so there are a whole series of people, both within the School Department, the chief of operations, whose responsibility, I believe, is to actively monitor that, and then when a problem arises, to reach out to the superintendent and, ultimately, to me as mayor of the city, or my office, to engage all the resources in the city to make that happen. That ultimately did not happen …The same with emergency operations…”

Well, what exactly had Cicilline been doing? “I was in the city. I was at DPW. I was at City Hall.” As he learned things, he acted, but he didn’t hear things quickly enough, he said.

Is he kicking himself for something he did, or didn’t, do? He said he was kicking himself for not being made aware or learning sooner about stranded kids.

Later, I took the mayor aside and asked if the incident shook his self-confidence. “No, I’m disappointed.” But he didn’t sound much disappointed in himself, except, perhaps, that he had relied too much on others. In retrospect, he said, he should have checked more often on what they were doing and on how they were carrying out their responsibilities.

Well, sure, and I don’t mean to pound the guy. But the fact that he hadn’t been more curious or more insistent — and learn more and turn to the state for help — was a significant shortcoming on his part, and, in facing yesterday’s cameras, he should have been more reflective and, yes, harder on himself.

M. Charles Bakst is The Journal’s political columnist.

mbakst@projo.com