GovernmentExecutive.com

In the Rose Garden this week, Andy Card stood close enough to the American flag that he was almost lost in the shrubbery. To some of the photographers recording a solemn President Bush standing amid his grim-faced Cabinet secretaries, Bush's outgoing chief of staff was nearly invisible.

The scene, however improvised, summed up Card's preferred style as the president's top aide for a startlingly long 63 months: supportive of the team; comfortable on the sidelines; wrapped from head to toe in the red, white, and blue. Standing behind Bush, Card's just-announced successor, Office of Management and Budget Director Joshua Bolten, was more visible. And he wore a pleasant smile.

Bolten, 51, won't run Bush's White House the same way that Card has managed it. Current and former White House aides predict this with certainty, with relief, and with a dollop of guilt. They confess they are conflicted, because Card is amiable and decent and hardworking.

But they are ready for a new coach, even if Card is not solely responsible for every post-re-election sinkhole: the lost year selling Social Security accounts; the Katrina mess; Scooter Libby's indictment and Karl Rove's entanglement in the Valerie Plame investigation; Harriet Miers's brief and rocky Supreme Court nomination; Dick Cheney's shotgun showdown; Claude Allen's troubles at Target; the Dubai ports fiasco; mutinous GOP conservatives; and job-approval numbers that have fallen below 40 percent.

Card may have been the chief that Bush wanted, but he also may not always have been the chief that Bush needed.

"This is a job that has shrunk under Andy," a former senior Bush aide observed last December. "It is no longer the [John] Podesta model or a [Ken] Duberstein model, especially with Karl's supremacy." He was referring to former chiefs of staff under Presidents Clinton and Reagan, respectively, and to Rove's 600-pound portfolio as senior Bush adviser.

Card's talent is "operational," the former aide gingerly continued. Bolten, he volunteered, mixes management heft, political savvy, and policy depth.

By all accounts, Bolten and Rove regard each other as peers and get along famously. (Bolten reveled in his first-term stint as deputy chief of staff for policy, which is technically the title Rove now holds.) "He's soft-spoken but very clear-thinking," Rove told Stanford Lawyer magazine as part of a 2004 alumni profile of Bolten written by The Washington Post's Jeff Birnbaum. "I love him in an entirely appropriate way.... He's professionally and personally one of the best people I've ever worked with."

Rove was absent for the Rose Garden salute to Card and the introduction of Bolten because he and his wife were spending spring break with their teenage son at their Florida home.

Former Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson said in an interview that Bush will miss Card -- "a friend who's always there looking out for the president's backside" -- but that Bolten "is going to be more aggressive than Andy" as a check on Rove.

"I think that is where the president is going to be served well by Josh," Thompson predicted, "because Josh is an independent thinker, and he is going to bring to the president different points of view, rather than the filtered view that Karl has been able to maintain."

Nonetheless, critics outside the White House lost no time this week in diagnosing a variety of perceived vulnerabilities in the new chief: To advocates of overhaul, Bolten is a Bush insider who lacks a magic wand to wave over Iraq, or the president, so they see his influence as marginal.

To some social conservatives, he's a moderate who could exercise too much influence (plus he's Jewish, single, and -- eyebrows up -- has been known to take his girlfriend to Camp David). And, like Card, Bolten is less-then-mesmerizing on television and as a speaker, which disappoints the message-meisters, who pray that Bush can find an effective new mouthpiece.

Bush's staff members say they know that change is coming, most likely gradually. Bush is giving Bolten the authority to rethink staff and organization. Some key individuals are expected to stay because Bush can't bear to lose their counsel (adviser Dan Bartlett is said to be in this category).

Others were already eyeing the exits for personal reasons: Communications Director Nicolle Wallace may eventually move to New York to be with her husband. And Bolten will try to find new, dazzling conscripts -- always a challenge in a second term.

Pete Wehner, the president's director of strategic initiatives, said that Bolten may "have worked for Goldman Sachs, but he is like E.F. Hutton: When he speaks, people listen -- and if they're smart, they take notes."

White House speechwriter John McConnell says he saw Bolten's take-charge attitude early in Bush's 2000 campaign. Bolten, then head of Bush's policy team, announced to the Texas chief executive, "Governor, the purpose of the meeting is to decide three matters." McConnell says: "I formed the immediate impression that he was a natural-born executive."

Bolten can use his OMB training and his saturation in policy to negotiate his way through Bush's Iraq challenges, a former administration aide suggested. "OMB oversaw all the fights, for example, among DOD and [National Intelligence Director John] Negroponte and the CIA, as well as the amount of money needed for Special Forces in Iraq versus new spending on weapons systems. Josh is fluent across all policy realms, and in that way, he could have a real impact on the war on terror, and the war in Iraq."

Bolten calls himself a "policy geek," and he likes to say that his OMB job -- minding the government's money -- taught him how to say no, a basic requirement for any chief of staff. "I found it one of the more challenging parts of the job, but I am getting more comfortable with it all the time," he told National Journal last spring. But such confessions could be for show: Bolten's colleagues describe him as assertively demanding.

"Andy channeled opinions, and Josh expresses them," said a former administration official. "Josh specializes in putting people on the hot seat. His expects a lot, and his message is, 'You serve at the pleasure of this president; you are fortunate to have this job, and you will do your job.' "

A current White House colleague chimed in: "I would not want to be a person who goes to a meeting with Josh Bolten unprepared. I've seen him be tough on people, but not rough on people.... It's always great to deal with Josh because he always knows as much or more about things than I do, and you get decisions out of him, and if you really need something, he's there."

Lawmakers are still begging Bush for a different White House A-team figure with more Capitol Hill experience to overcome what they see as the president's indifference to the legislative branch and his staff's reputation for unnecessary slights. Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., has not been shy about giving the White House a menu of names.

He hailed Bolten for telephoning him and other senior lawmakers on Tuesday to solicit their thoughts. Lott's message to Bolten: "When you get a call from a senator, it's nice when you take the call and return it, [not] kick it down the hall."

The incoming chief of staff understands this sort of umbrage: In the summer of 2003, at a time when relations between OMB and congressional appropriators had been frosty, Bolten -- who spent the late '80s working as a Senate Finance Committee counsel -- tried to warm things up by quietly joining then-Appropriations Chairman Ted Stevens for some summer fishing in Alaska.

A top Senate GOP leadership aide added that Bush's legislative-affairs director, Candi Wolff -- who is vigorously defended by her co-workers inside the White House -- is "smart, but I think sometimes she has a sharp tongue. Sometimes I think their intelligence gets out in front of them, and it's almost a little disrespectful to the member."

Bolten will need more than phone calls and a rod and reel to revive a White House that is built on Bush's personality and interests without necessarily compensating for the inevitable voids.

One White House aide observed recently that whether it's habit or hubris, Bush prefers to state rather than debate. "I hear him say it all the time: 'This is what you need to understand,' instead of asking, 'What do you think I need to understand?' "

Lawmakers of both parties and their aides on Capitol Hill tell reporters privately that they assume the dismissive treatment they get from Bush's team is learned from Bush himself.

Organizationally, Bush favors a top-down, CEO's administration: A handful of people make the decisions. If Bolten has been listening for five years, the rest of the administration wants to help.