Government Executive - Authors - Alexis Simendinger

Senate confirms seven Cabinet-level nominees

Alexis Simendinger — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500

By unanimous consent, the Senate confirmed at 3:42 p.m. Tuesday the nominations of Obama's picks to lead the departments of Energy (Steven Chu), Education (Arne Duncan), Homeland Security (Janet Napolitano), Interior (Ken Salazar), Veterans Affairs (Eric Shinseki) and Agriculture (Tom Vilsack).

The Senate also confirmed Peter Orszag to be director of the Office of Management and Budget, a Cabinet-level post. With those seven approvals, Obama came close to matching President George W. Bush's record of moving seven of his nominees into their new posts in 2001 on the same afternoon he was sworn in.

Hillary Rodham Clinton's confirmation to be secretary of State was delayed by a day at the insistence of Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who requested a roll-call vote on her nomination. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the Senate will have three hours to debate Clinton's appointment Wednesday before they vote Wednesday afternoon.

"I expect her to be easily confirmed," Cornyn conceded during an interview. But he explained that he wanted to deny Clinton unanimous-consent affirmation on Inauguration Day so he could use a floor vote to "air my concerns" that Bill and Hillary Clinton have not been "transparent enough" about President Clinton's foundation fundraising from foreign nationals. Cornyn wants the Clintons to do "more work" to eliminate conflicts of interest.

"If it doesn't get handled now, then it probably won't get handled, so it's important to talk about it," he told National Journal.

Cornyn said GOP senators may seek to place a hold on the confirmation of Eric Holder to be attorney general, once Holder wins approval from the Judiciary Committee, which could happen Wednesday. Such a hold would carry Senate consideration over into next week.

As he departed the Capitol Tuesday, Cornyn said he had spoken to Hillary Clinton about his concerns, and explained that he hoped to win changes in the disclosure agreement worked out between President Clinton and the government, because she is the nation's "top diplomat." The former first lady told Cornyn she had agreed to unusual disclosures and accountability measures to make her husband's transactions more visible, and that she hoped that any additional steps the Senate seeks would not be "specific to her," Cornyn said. Their conversations, he added, were "cool and civil. She understands the concerns."

Check out the blog Lost in Transition, a joint effort of Government Executive and National Journal.

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Agency heads get guidance on top hires

Alexis Simendinger — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Obama transition officials are making it clear to incoming Cabinet secretaries and agency heads that they'll be handed a slate of perhaps five or six pre-screened candidates for the top jobs in their departments and encouraged to interview and hire from among those candidates.

If the secretaries want to reach outside those lists to make their own hires, they will be required to justify their picks to the president-elect's top advisers, some of whom are headed for the offices of the White House Counsel and White House personnel.

The West Wing's control over the top slots in each department is similar to the practices of Barack Obama's predecessors, Presidents Bush and Clinton, but with a twist.

The secretaries are being told that the ethnic and racial makeup of the senior officials in their departments should reflect diversity to the extent possible. Apparently, the new White House will be keeping track, according to sources close to the transition.

Outside observers have said they're puzzled, however, that Hillary Rodham Clinton -- known for having female-dominated staffs while first lady, New York senator and presidential contender -- had by early this week tapped eight white men and one woman to help her at the State Department, if she's confirmed as secretary. Although Clinton supposedly cut a deal with Obama to be able to hire her own team, some observers are dubious. Two sources report there's already been some friction between Clinton and deputy-designate James Steinberg, suggesting that she accepted her deputy more than selected him.

Check out the blog Lost in Transition, a joint effort of Government Executive and National Journal.

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Obama expected to name Peter Orszag OMB director

Alexis Simendinger — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0500

National Journal sources.

The Office of Management and Budget job -- seen as a key post to help Obama deliver on his domestic policy agenda amidst the gloom of a $700 billion federal financial rescue, a recession and the prospects of a $1 trillion deficit next year -- carries Cabinet rank. An announcement is expected soon, but could come with other personnel decisions Obama is making to lead the Treasury Department and National Economic Council in his White House.

The two leading candidates to become Obama's "honest broker" lead at the NEC are Dan Tarullo and Jacob "Jack" Lew, both respected former members of Bill Clinton's deep economic bench. Both have senior government and academic track records.

Tarullo, a former assistant to the president for international economic policy, is coordinating part of Obama's economic transition team. Lew, a former OMB director and former executive vice president at New York University, heads Citigroup's alternative investments group. Informed sources report that economist Doug Elmendorf is expected to be the Democrats' choice on Capitol Hill to succeed Orszag at CBO. Elmendorf has worked at the Federal Reserve, Treasury, the White House Council of Economic Advisers and CBO, and succeeded Orszag as head of the Brookings Institution's economic-policy initiative called the Hamilton Project.

Orszag, who will turn 40 on Dec. 16, has been praised by lawmakers from both parties as an objective analyst with deep knowledge of the most pressing fiscal issues of the day, including health care policy, Social Security, pensions, and global climate change. He is the unusual economist who blends an understanding of politics, policy and communications in ways that wrap zesty quotes around complex ideas.

If confirmed by the Senate to move to OMB, Orszag will have completed half of his four-year CBO term. Orszag, a father of two school-age children and an avid runner, holds degrees from Princeton University and the London School of Economics. The National Academies of Sciences' Institute of Medicine recently made him a member.

Click here to read the new blog Lost in Transition, a joint effort of Government Executive and National Journal.

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Transition team wastes no time

Alexis Simendinger — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0500

President-elect Obama hosted an economic summit in Chicago on Friday, to make the most of his short metamorphosis from candidate to world leader and to get his administration off to a quick, confident start on January 20.

The meeting with a group of government, academic, financial, and business experts was vaguely reminiscent of Bill Clinton's economic summit in Little Rock, Ark., during his own 1992 transition. But emulating Clinton's disorganized start definitely is not Obama's ambition.

"In my lifetime, it has never been more important to have an absolutely seamless transfer of power and authority," said Bill Galston, who was a White House domestic policy adviser in the early days of Clinton's presidency. "There is no option for a dropped baton."

Clinton and his youthful team came to regret many of the moves they made during their meandering preparations for governing. And 16 years later, they have not been shy about warning Obama about their stumbles. Some Democrats even trace their party's 1994 loss of the House and Senate back to that undisciplined transition, when the incoming president spent little time trying to build relationships with his party's power brokers on Capitol Hill yet ceded control of his early legislative agenda to them.

Clinton, in effect, kept campaigning through his transition, using up precious time traveling, talking, and talking some more, rather than ducking out of sight long enough to listen and plan. And as a small-state governor, he mistakenly believed that picking his Cabinet -- with diversity in his mind as much as or more than skills -- would be essential before assembling a White House team. Making matters worse, his initial White House staff had too little experience with Washington's ways, and it quickly showed.

One veteran of past Democratic transitions said that Obama's Friday gathering was intended to be more than Clinton's "Little Rock two-day gabfest," describing it as "a more intense dialogue, one that serves his need to know."

Among those who participated were economic advisers who became familiar faces during Obama's campaign (and some who may get jobs in his administration), including former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, and a diverse cast of players who can speak to the economic woes of cities, states, industries, and workers, like Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm.

As Obama's Democratic supporters are keenly aware, he will take command of two expensive wars in the midst of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. He will inherit what could be a slide into the deepest recession in a quarter-century, plus an ocean of red ink that could exceed $1 trillion next year. And by February, Obama must revise President Bush's handover budget and begin reordering Uncle Sam's priorities.

"The reason an early start is smart is because you really do have to hit the ground running with the crises facing this president," said former Rep. Leon Panetta, who has offered transition insights to Obama's team. Panetta was Clinton's second of four chiefs of staff after serving as his budget director.

Obama got an early jump on his transition planning last spring, turning discreetly to Washington veterans and survivors of the Clinton years for advice on how best to launch his administration should he win the White House. Obama's transition helpers were sworn to secrecy until Election Day, and dozens of usually loose-lipped Democrats kept quiet about their work, leery of hurting the nominee's chances for victory and in many cases harboring private ambitions to work in an Obama administration.

On Wednesday, Obama allowed many of his transition helpers to lift their veils, and announced their names. Obama started putting the pieces on his chessboard by asking Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois to become the White House chief of staff, a position the House Democratic Caucus chairman accepted on Thursday after much deliberation. Emanuel was said to be torn about the prospect of abandoning his longtime ambition of becoming the first Jewish speaker of the House. Several sources said that Obama's economic team had not quite jelled and might not be ready for introduction until at least next week.

President Bush, promising a professional and supportive transition, plans to meet with his successor on Monday and has ordered his own administration to give the Obama team any briefings and information the president-elect requests or needs. The day after the election, Obama began receiving the same national security briefing that Bush gets each morning.

One of the most interesting things that the Bush White House did in the run-up to the election was to negotiate with both the Obama and McCain campaigns on developing and purchasing a cutting-edge software system capable of handling the thousands of résumés that will inundate the incoming administration. When Bush was first elected eight years ago, the system he used for tracking job seekers was considered high tech for the time. But it is now "sub-optimal," said Blake Gottesman, assistant to the president and head of White House operations. "We said, 'Let's agree on what it's going to look like. And we'll spend the money for the contracts.' " That new system is in place and awaiting the Obama administration, he said.

The White House National Security Council kept the national security advisers to both presidential nominees abreast of Bush's foreign-policy decisions on, for instance, North Korea and Iraq, said spokesman Gordon Johndroe. But most of the Bush White House's transition work this year focused on preparing detailed explanations and briefing materials about Bush policies and operations, so that the next president's team will have a solid foundation of knowledge on day one.

Now that Obama is president-elect, he is privy to classified information that he could not see before -- about Iran, for example. Half of the NSC career staff -- approximately 100 people -- will remain in place to serve Obama until he replaces them. Although by law Bush's NSC records will be removed and archived, copies of records and information will remain behind, and the NSC's records-management staff members will be able to quickly find almost anything the new president and his advisers request, Johndroe added.

On the day after the election, Obama and his transition team signed an important memorandum of understanding with the General Services Administration that officially affirms his new status and releases $5.3 million in federal funds for his transition, with workspace and equipment provided on three floors of a secure building in downtown Washington. Obama's transition headquarters in Chicago announced, in keeping with Democratic Party inclusiveness, that the president-elect has three transition chairs: John Podesta, Clinton's fourth White House chief of staff and president of the Center for American Progress, an influential left-leaning think tank; Valerie Jarrett, who has known the Obamas in Chicago for 17 years; and Obama's former Senate chief of staff, Pete Rouse.

Many on Obama's transition team have ties to former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, author of "Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis" and someone many Washington hands mentioned as a possible White House chief of staff. Daschle, however, is thought to prefer the post of secretary of Health and Human Services.

The Obama transition team has already put together a VIP advisory board of former Democratic officials with impressive résumés, including former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Carol Browner, former Commerce Secretary William Daley, and domestic policy and legal specialist Christopher Edley. The advisory team is a blend of Obama supporters from all phases of his life and includes Harvard friends, former colleagues, and seasoned government hands who spent years in the Clinton administration. The board has worked for months on policy development, personnel picks and vetting, and reviews of the White House and the agencies and departments to determine where Obama should make changes.

The president-elect requires his transition team to be nearly as scrupulous about keeping an arm's-length distance from registered lobbying as he will expect his White House staff to be once it is formally on the federal payroll next year. Already, there is grumbling in Washington that Obama's transition is too closed to experts not knighted by Podesta and is perhaps overzealous in freezing out specialists who could be helpful on issues but are deemed untouchables because they represented clients in those areas. One Democratic source who is not a registered lobbyist said that the transition team may circumvent its own strictures by tapping some specialists for "advisory roles."

At the time the senator from Illinois began to contemplate actually governing the nation, he was preoccupied with pulling together a strong set of advisers on international affairs, the area where he was deemed most vulnerable. Building an economic team eventually loomed larger because of the financial crisis that turned dramatically worse in mid-September.

Washington's chattering class is loud in urging Obama to move swiftly to nominate key economic advisers -- both to reassure Americans and the markets and to get a jump on the often-lengthy Senate confirmation process. Many of these observers think that Obama won decisively enough to elicit at least a measure of cooperation on Capitol Hill and from the public, including many of those who did not vote for him. But it will be Congress that ensures or scuttles Obama's success.

"His ability to work successfully with the Congress is the whole ball game," said Joel Johnson, a partner in the Glover Park Group and a former Daschle aide who was a senior adviser in the Clinton White House. "Obama has big problems to solve -- a far-reaching and complicated agenda. And none of it happens without a majority [in Congress].... Apart from some executive actions, like reversing some executive orders imposed by the Bush administration, everything he needs to do to turn the country around is going to require congressional approval."

A lesson Clinton learned is that Democratic majorities in Congress are helpful but don't automatically translate into support for a new Democratic president's proposals. A lesson Bush learned too late was that managing his party in Congress does not mean dictating in all things. "I think there are big opportunities in strengthened Democratic majorities," Johnson added, "but they are opportunities that must be created and managed by the White House."

A former lawmaker predicts that it will be tougher than it looks for Obama to command his party's troops on the Hill. "It's going to be a challenge," said one former Democratic lawmaker. "You're going to have Democrats who feel they've had eight years in Siberia and [have] a lot of pent-up frustrations. And there will be a greater number of Blue Dogs to reckon with.... The basic decision Obama has to make is, does he try to work with Republicans, or are they going to be so insular it won't work?"

Transition experts are also watching carefully to see how Obama shifts some of his campaign staff into a governing mode after a two-year, hard-fought contest. Obama has to adjust his own thinking, a conversion that rarely happens for newly elected presidents in days, or even weeks. The 77-day-long transition is especially important for that reason.

Obama's top strategists earned plaudits from both parties for the disciplined and innovative ways they organized the Obama-Biden campaign, challenging the Democratic status quo as well as a down-on-its-heels GOP. The campaign overcame doubts about Obama's experience, his background, and his vision for the country. But governing is not campaigning, and successful governing takes a different mix of players. Some transition experts have observed that Clinton adapted campaigning to the modern presidency -- the phenomenon of the permanent campaign -- by campaigning for policies.

Obama, a magnificent communicator, may find his sweet spot with a seasoned governing team, a cooperative Congress, and the pressure to deliver or else. "I think we're going to see an effort by the president-elect to demonstrate that he's going to seek the best, smartest, most serious people -- regardless of party -- to give him the credibility to deal with national security and economic affairs," said the veteran transition adviser. "I think Obama is going to be very serious about that."

Several sources predict that Obama's most reassuring decision tied to Iraq and Afghanistan will be keeping Defense Secretary Robert Gates in place for at least a year, layering in his own defense team beneath Gates. "That obviously would make that transition easier," said one former Clinton aide.

Johnson, a registered lobbyist (and quick to add that he has not advised Obama's team), said asking Gates to remain would provide continuity on national security issues at a time when the economy is arguably a more pressing emergency. (There is some question about whether Gates is willing to stay on, and there's a contingent of support for nominating retiring Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska to take over the Defense Department.)

"The economy has cratered," Johnson continued. "Do you really want to have a new team to worry about in the Pentagon?" As president-elect, "you don't know the path you're on with the economy, but you know the path you're on in Iraq. Why not keep the guy who's executed the orders in place to... finish doing a job, which is simply carrying out from very clear directives what Obama said he would do?"

And that's exactly what the career professionals in the Pentagon may be eager to do for the 44th president, said Jeffrey Smith, a former CIA counsel and the 1992-93 head of Clinton's Defense transition team. "Candidly, I think a lot of them really want new leadership," he said.

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Election results will influence the regulatory climate

Alexis Simendinger — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's note: This article is excerpted from a National Journal story exploring how much of a difference the next president will be able to make in a number of policy areas.

The Bush era, which ushered in business-friendly federal regulation and enforcement, would end if Barack Obama wins in November and joins forces with a Democratic-controlled Congress, say advocates for organized labor and the business community, and proponents of transparent, accountable government.

John McCain, on the other hand, is perceived in all quarters as something of a wild card because of his Senate record and his mixed messages. Until recently a self-described deregulator, McCain has been showing a populist streak. He has exhibited uneven enthusiasms for the worries of Big Business, as well as the little guy, but experts think that his guiding philosophy as president would lean toward shrinking the size and reach of government. "I'm always for less regulation," McCain told The Wall Street Journal in March. "I'd like to see a lot of the unnecessary government regulations eliminated, not just a moratorium."

A business representative who asked not to be identified said, "From a business-community point of view, I think we could deal with McCain. I don't think we could deal with Obama."

Informed observers predict that McCain would not rubber-stamp the Bush administration's deregulatory instincts but nevertheless would come closer to maintaining the status quo than would his Democratic rival.

Obama's brief record in the Senate leaves even Democratic-leaning advocacy groups with questions about what to expect, especially if he inherits exploding deficits and declining revenues in a bleak economy. But members of the business community, looking at the former Clinton administration officials and lawmakers who are advising the senator from Illinois, see no mystery. They're betting that tough new regulations would be Obama's goal. And they shudder, especially about the prospect of new environmental regulations.

Regulatory policy in any new administration invites the imposition of "change," even with Congress on the sidelines or at loggerheads over new legislation. The executive branch has plenty of latitude in enforcing existing laws, depending on the druthers of the president and his appointees. Seismic policy swings throughout the regulatory agencies can be driven by White House edicts and tied to existing resources, however lean. Working in cooperation with a willing Congress, a president can adopt an aggressive regulatory posture, fueled by new laws and new appropriations, or the White House can opt to apply a light regulatory hand, as Bush has done.

On environmental and ethics-lobbying regulations, both Obama and McCain have pledged to get tough. Each has promised that his administration would deliver greater transparency, accountability, and competence. Both have said they see a need for ramped-up oversight. In the regulatory categories of labor, energy, consumer protections, use of science, land conservation, and executive secrecy, advocates generally expect Obama to cast himself as the anti-Bush.

Because Obama serves on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, "we would expect a strong commitment for [worker safety and health protections] and having the job-safety and health agencies be more aggressive," said Peg Seminario, the AFL-CIO's longtime director of safety and health. For example, Obama has said he would reinstate the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's controversial ergonomics rule, would extend OSHA coverage to "all public employees," and would increase the agency's funds for enforcement and training.

Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, a good-government group, predicted that Obama would quickly revoke Bush's pro-business executive order on regulatory review, which the Office of Management and Budget oversees, and tip the scales back toward the pro-regulatory regime that President Clinton adopted. Bass also suggests that the Democratic-led Congress could assist an Obama administration to clear-cut through the regulatory policies that Bush leaves behind. Under the Congressional Review Act, Congress could adopt a far-reaching and expedited resolution of disapproval, which Obama could sign to signal the arrival of a new sheriff in town. "If they coordinate," Bass said, "it probably could work."

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For GOP, a second chance at disaster management

Alexis Simendinger — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The candidate who made "Country First" his campaign slogan, and "service" the opening theme for his convention is well positioned to adapt to a natural disaster, and McCain moved quickly to Mississippi to be nearer the scene and ready with his themes: "It... has got to be Americans helping Americans. America first," McCain told NBC News when asked about his convention on Sunday. "Open your wallets, your hearts -- all of your assistance. And I think our people can and want to be committed to that cause rather than anything political."

Republican operatives and analysts were conspicuously silent when asked for their thoughts about new message opportunities, and about the risks to McCain of losing his prime-time catapult into the fall campaign. Republicans tied to the nominee's campaign and to convention operations distributed talking points that warned their people not to talk to the media about political implications tied to Gustav. "It's not about party; it's about Americans," said Brett O'Donnell, who is one of the convention program managers.

"He doesn't get a chance, when all of America is listening, to provide an unedited commentary about what he believes and about what he wants to do," said GOP pollster and consultant Frank Luntz, who was in Minneapolis on Sunday conducting a focus group with 25 undecided voters. Those Twin Cities residents all agreed that McCain's convention should continue, despite Gustav's impact. "It is a huge loss for him personally," Luntz continued, "but it could be a success for the GOP if -- and this is a big if -- they handle the tragedy effectively."

The do-over chances are there, McCain supporters believe. "Obviously, we'd rather not have a hurricane," said Mark McKinnon, who created political ads and messages for President Bush. "And pray for no damage, no injury and no loss of life. But since there is one, it does present an opportunity for both Senator McCain and President Bush," he added. "It's a chance for McCain to be assertive and compassionate in the face of a natural disaster."

Perhaps, but some Democrats think that it's a reminder the Republicans would rather avoid. "Katrina effectively ended Bush's presidency," said Doug Sosnik, who was a senior adviser to President Clinton in the White House. "Any reminder of this failure is bad for McCain, as well as all Republican candidates across the country."

But Don Baer, who was a communications adviser to President Clinton, thinks that McCain's long record of national service could benefit from being linked to a natural disaster such as Gustav. "They need to be defining his time in Washington as more than business as usual, and the speakers at the convention could be used to describe what he did and what he's done in a meaningful way," he said.

During a campaign stop in New Orleans in April, McCain made some straight-talk promises he will be expected to deliver on, even before the election. "Never again will a disaster of this nature be handled in the terrible and disgraceful way it's been handled," McCain vowed, "It will never, ever again happen."

Mike McCurry, a White House press secretary under Clinton, said that the Bush administration and Republican officials get "a chance to show that they are getting it right... an opportunity to demonstrate competency and compassion, and that was part of what they needed to communicate anyhow."

An added benefit to McCain might be a welcome breather -- a little less focus on Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, his running mate, which McCurry saw as "a good thing for the ticket.... They get more time to get her up to speed" as a polished national candidate.

For full coverage of the Republican National Convention, go to NationalJournal.com.

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Bill would give National Archives greater reach in electronic records management

Alexis Simendinger — Fri, 16 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Officials at the National Archives are conflicted about new powers that the House is poised to give them to ride herd on the electronic messages, records, and e-mails of future presidents.

The National Archives and Records Administration is already tasked with capturing, preserving, and cataloguing the records of presidents and their teams at the end of their tenures.

The new legislation would require the Archives to create mandatory standards for electronic records management systems and to monitor their use by future administrations.

By bipartisan consensus, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee approved such a bill on May 1, and House leaders could bring the measure to the floor anytime.

"I'm surprised [the House leadership] hasn't done that already," one House Republican aide commented on May 13. "I don't think it will raise a lot of controversy."

Archivists worry about becoming politicized pariahs if presidents and their teams see them as internal-affairs investigators who report transgressions to the legislative branch. Interviews with lawmakers and their aides suggest that despite such hand-wringing, the measure will likely clear the House, although Senate attention is a question mark. The measure won bipartisan support because the Archives and President Bush's successor would be given long transition periods to comply, and because enforcement would be restricted to congressional oversight based on annual reports from the Archives to Congress.

Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said that the Bush White House, while only the second administration to make significant use of electronic records in governing, made action necessary. The White House "lost" millions of e-mails when it moved data from one commercial software system to another, Waxman lamented at the markup. It relied for five years on a flawed archiving system, he said, and Bush's team looked the other way while aides conducted federal business off-line on e-mail accounts of the Republican National Committee without ensuring that those records were archived.

"What's happened during this administration certainly brought home the need for us to do some thinking about the problem and further legislation on it," Waxman said in an interview this week. "There has been a lot of failure on the part of people at the White House to think through how to have an archived system that would capture the information."

Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., the ranking committee member, has for years worked closely with Waxman on government records issues. He sounded just as eager this month to hasten fixes that will keep pace with new technologies, although he isn't entirely satisfied with the panel's bill.

"I would urge the chairman to continue to refine this bill to make sure we get it right on issues such as managing the cost of preserving unknown but presumably vast electronic databases; how to include emerging media like blogs and virtual-reality avatars in such a system; and the functional parameters of any [technological] requirement [that is] searchable," Davis said before approving the measure.

The Government Accountability Office and outside open-records groups such as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington issued reports this spring outlining some of the problems they unearthed with government records. Privately, Archives' experts have expressed similar worries about materials being lost to history, but they warn that the complications of emerging technologies and the constitutional tensions between the federal branches make writing legislation a challenge. Currently, presidents and their staffs may seek help from federal archivists while they're in office, but NARA would be handed new clout.

"Such authority is unprecedented and would mark a significant departure from accepted and long-standing practice," Paul Wester, NARA's modern records program director, told the committee in April. Future administrations would likely deem it "intrusive to White House records management processes."

Gary Stern, NARA's general counsel, told the panel, "The president is responsible for his own records management" under current law, and Congress should ask the Justice Department for advice about how far it can go beyond that. (The bill moved out of committee without contact with Justice, aides said.)

Waxman and Davis, along with their aides and NARA officials, have met frequently with attorneys from the Bush counsel's office over the last few months to discuss efforts to recover data and how to send presidential records to the Archives in January. Another such meeting will take place in May, an aide said.

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Wall between political operatives, agencies crumbling

Alexis Simendinger — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Or maybe just one more example. Democratic committee chairmen are digging into the small type of government contracts that benefited Bush administration friends. They want to know more about White House briefings that encouraged workers in federal agencies to help the GOP. And they want to know much more about White House e-mails written on Republican National Committee accounts -- especially the ones that seem to have gone missing.

Goodling explained to lawmakers that her RNC training, including poring over old news clippings and checking voter registrations to identify like-minded Republicans, proved helpful in her subsequent job as an adviser to the attorney general, since she was one of three or four people who screened new hires in the Justice Department. But more important, Goodling told Congress, was her ability after seven years with the Bush team to ferret out -- with detailed guidance from those above her -- the attributes her bosses at Justice and the White House valued in prospective prosecutors.

"I do acknowledge that I may have gone too far in asking political questions of applicants for career positions," Goodling told the House Judiciary Committee after securing immunity from federal prosecution, "and I may have taken inappropriate political considerations into account on some occasions."

To the administration's critics, stuffing the lower ranks of the Justice Department with conservative Republicans fits right in with their theory that top-level U.S. attorneys were fired because they weren't furthering the electoral prospects of the GOP -- an unsavory sort of executive engineering that damaged morale, undercut the administration's credibility, and possibly interfered with delivery of justice.

The ultimate focus of the various investigations is the White House Office of Political Affairs, under the supervision of Karl Rove, Bush's deputy chief of staff and senior political adviser. Goodling didn't recall talking directly to Rove, but she described having regular conversations with his aides about finding attorneys who would be "ideologically compatible" with the president.

It isn't just Democrats who say that the linkage between White House staffers, government functions, and the interests of the Republican Party has become too tight.

"I'm appalled," Republican political consultant Ed Rollins says of the heavy-handed partisan politics that have been revealed in this year's congressional oversight hearings. Rollins was political affairs director in the Reagan administration -- the first one to have such a government-funded office.

In Rollins's day, firewalls kept the political operatives from having direct contact with executive departments -- particularly Justice.

"What's happened with this administration is that too many people came in, like the Karl Roves, who had no experience in government," Rollins says. "Campaigns are very separate things, where you're always trying to think politically."

Political scientists who have studied how presidents organize their administrations say that the imposition of campaign-inspired political controls inside the executive branch evolved throughout the 20th century.

"Institutionalized politics in the White House has been around at least since FDR expanded the Executive Office of the President and brought his close advisers into the White House," said Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a University of Pennsylvania political scientist who has written extensively on the subject.

President Reagan was the first to put a name to a specialized office that became known as "political affairs." The office was the contact point for all the constituencies that supported Reagan's re-election as well as his role as head of his party. President Clinton elevated the head of his political affairs office to Cabinet-level status, with a seat among senior staff and policy advisers.

Bush's creation of a division for Rove, called the Office of Strategic Initiatives, went the next step, establishing a centralized GOP watchtower over just about all facets of government with one eye on promoting the Republican Party and the other on ways to clobber Democrats.

"Bush has prioritized politics more than any other president because he's expanded the White House Office and all the wings in it," Tenpas said.

Bush's defenders argue that politics are afoot in Washington, all right -- the kind practiced by the opposition party during an emotional and unpopular war, as it prepares for a wide-open presidential election in 2008. The same Democrats, they point out, never worked up such a lather over the 103 fundraising coffees hosted inside the Clinton White House, or the hundreds of Lincoln Bedroom sleepovers for generous Democratic donors as Clinton geared up for re-election.

For Democrats now in the congressional majority, "everything is just media-driven" and the organizing principle is, " 'What story can we create today to make the Republicans look bad?' " said longtime Republican strategist Charlie Black, who is close to both Presidents Bush. Rove is "the guy to blame who stole the [2000] election," he added.

Rewards, and Punishments

On George W. Bush's first full day on the job, and again on his 99th day in the Oval Office in 2001, the White House sent Rove, who had transitioned from campaign manager to West Wing senior adviser, to sit in NBC's "Meet the Press" hot seat. During the interviews, Rove wove together Bush's new agenda and his conservative political disposition to respond to questions from moderator Tim Russert.

Asked about Bush's regulatory intentions to weaken his predecessor's limits on arsenic in drinking water, Rove knew that the question was aimed at the president's perceived anti-environmentalism. And because Rove grew up in Utah and the West, he thought he had a firsthand understanding of how arsenic could be a naturally occurring substance in some water supplies and how tougher regulation would not be appreciated by industry or the energy sector.

"This limit of 10 [parts per billion] was arrived at by using a test group of malnourished Taiwanese farmers who drank water that had naturally occurring arsenic concentrations of between 100 and 500 parts per billion," Rove said. "So we're going to ... make a determination on the basis of sound science. And it's not going to take us eight years to get it done. We're going to get it done this year."

These were pithy sound bites -- "malnourished Taiwanese farmers" was the sort of zinger a political adviser would dream up -- but as it turned out, the public disagreed with Bush on the substantive question of allowable poisons in drinking water, and he wound up adopting the Clinton arsenic rule. By August of his first year, Bush was saying he wished he could get a do-over on arsenic.

Those Rove interviews, which wandered over an expanse of policy questions, were memorable, said Doug Sosnik, who was Clinton's political affairs director in the White House and later his senior adviser, because Rove "was transparent and open about the politics driving the policy." Based on his own experience, Sosnik remembers thinking that such openness was "a big mistake."

"For anyone to say there isn't politics in the White House is ridiculous," Sosnik continued, conceding that the Clinton White House justly earned a reputation for being overtly political while governing. Clinton's campaign finance activities, which sparked federal and congressional investigations, were an example of "pushing all the way to the line without crossing it," he said.

The evolution from the Clinton political operation to the Bush shop holds distinctions with real differences, Clinton's former aides argue.

"The problem with this White House is that they conflated the policy and political roles that Rove had so that they are indistinguishable," Sosnik said. "They took the letter of the law and pushed it to at least the line, if not over it, and in the process certainly violated the spirit of it. They got used to it; that was the culture. And they had a supplicant Congress that was their witness protection program. It was a culture where everyone understood the reward system."

That culture -- and Bush's ambition to consolidate executive power -- has helped erode Bush's credibility and his powers to persuade, suggested Leon Panetta, who was Clinton's second chief of staff, his former budget director, and for 17 years before that a Democratic member of Congress from California. "Every president has that political instinct, but you cannot make everything you do the result of political motivation because you lose the ability to persuade the American people that substantively it is in their interest," he said.

Clinton learned, after his first two nominees were shot down, that the Justice Department was particularly volatile. As numerous aides confided to reporters at the time, Clinton would have loved to replace Attorney General Janet Reno but did not dare. She ended up sticking around for eight years.

"When it comes to the Justice Department, it has to operate in a separate sphere," Panetta added. "You cannot have an attorney general and a Justice Department act as if they're part of the Republican National Committee."

That lesson comes courtesy of John Mitchell. As a reward for Mitchell's prowess as manager of Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign, the president named him attorney general in 1969. By 1977, Mitchell was in prison for his Watergate crimes.

"The Guy They Love to Hate"

The White House response to the chorus of critics, most of them Democrats, is threefold. Politics, it says, is part of governing. Second, the president expects Rove to practice politics because that's his role in the White House, and Bush believes that administration critics take a peculiar pleasure in making Rove a target. And third, the administration may have entertained political considerations before removing the U.S. attorneys, but there was no political interference with their work.

"People use the word 'politics' in strange ways these days," deputy White House press secretary Dana Perino said. "I don't think that's a bad word. To suggest that we should not think about the politics of an issue in terms of the outcome would be foolish."

To the White House, attacks on Rove are at once understandable and still puzzling. "There's this obsession with Karl that is bordering on the weird, and almost the disturbing," Perino said. "He's the guy they love to hate. He's the president's political adviser, so I don't know how they can say what's on the spectrum of 'too political.' "

Aiming Democratic oversight at Rove's behavior is another way of going after the president's remaining hard-core base of conservative support, because Rove is the liaison to that part of Bush's world, said presidential historian Al Felzenberg, who is a former Heritage Foundation fellow, an author, and the former spokesman for the 9/11 commission.

"I have never seen this kind of vitriol over a staff member," he said. "I think the Democrats have decided to focus on Rove because they feel that if they knock the Rove leg out from under the administration, the entire administration will collapse. I think what's driving it is that he's successful. But the legend of Karl Rove comes more from his opponents than it does from him. I don't hear Republicans saying he's indispensable."

"They've Hurt This President"

Presidents have long kept their closest political advisers within arm's reach -- Franklin D. Roosevelt relied on Harry Hopkins, for example, and President Truman turned to Clark Clifford -- but the institutional White House changes evolved in tandem with the decline of the national political parties as power bases and the rise of candidate-centered campaigns, largely inspired by the shift from caucuses to presidential primaries. Presidents adapted to the shifting re-election terrain by expanding the White House staff and creating teams of political experts to strengthen White House control of executive agencies and to curry votes.

Nixon made substantial organizational changes to the White House aimed at consolidating his reach over Cabinet departments and agencies, as well as his influence over Congress. In elaborate secrecy, Nixon hatched a reorganization plan in 1970 that resulted in the creation of a Domestic Council, as well as the Office of Management and Budget.

Nixon had already asserted his command of foreign policy through Henry Kissinger, and with his reorganization he ensured that every document on domestic affairs and every decision about domestic policy would take place in the West Wing under the supervision of counselor John Ehrlichman.

After Nixon went down in Watergate, the next several presidents formalized the structures that support their role as head of a political party. This brought civil servants under the protection of the Hatch Act, which forbids manipulation by political bosses, and led to safeguards, such as financial disclosure forms.

Reagan established the Office of Political Affairs in the White House and brought in campaign aides Lyn Nofziger and Rollins to run it. As Nofziger recalled before his death, James Baker came to him after Reagan's victory and said, "I want somebody to handle politics, on the political end, as an assistant to the president for political affairs."

Nofziger did not remain in government for long before turning the office over to Rollins, but his initial job description was to maintain contact with the RNC, the state committees, and politically important allies of the president around the country. Once inside the White House, Nofziger told the University of Virginia during a lengthy oral history interview, he realized he wanted to expand his reach into the selection of personnel because Reagan's team "had no concept of the political part of government. They were looking for competent people. I tried to explain to them that the first thing you do is get loyal people, and competence is a bonus."

The power of the advisers depends on the relationships they share with the president, according to interviews with some who have held the positions and according to published studies. For example, President George H.W. Bush was closer to his longtime independent political adviser, Robert Teeter, than he was to his White House political staff. And Bush found in James Baker a hybrid adviser who was accomplished in governing as a Cabinet secretary yet also powerful as a political adviser who ran campaigns and managed the White House staff.

Clinton sought the political advice of James Carville and Paul Begala long after they helped him get elected in 1992, but Carville said from the outset that he had no interest in hiring on with the White House staff. Begala eventually accepted a White House post, and was a senior Clinton adviser when the Monica Lewinsky story became public.

Bush pushed things further by building his White House structure around Rove, who commands a kingdom of 42 people. In addition to Rove's long-range strategic planning and supervision of the Office of Political Affairs, which has a staff of 10 people and direct ties to the RNC, his reach includes the White House offices of Public Liaison and Intergovernmental Affairs. Rove also signs off on personnel picks and presidential appointments, and he has plenty to say about communications and legislation.

In 2005, Bush gave his political architect the add-on title of deputy chief of staff, handling policy. But a year ago, Bush's new chief of staff, Joshua Bolten, nominally trimmed Rove's hold over policy and said that Rove would focus his talents on the midterm elections.

Still, Rove maintains his mythological power by virtue of his ties to the president. Few in government have the standing to "hold him in check," Rollins said. The decisions made by Rove and his colleagues -- co-workers who have no desire or ability to reduce his influence -- have "hurt this president. And especially in dealing with a place like Justice, which should always have been a place of integrity," Rollins said.

On Guard

To save presidents from themselves and their clever advisers, White House history suggests that checks and balances are essential. Sticklers for policing the commingling of politics and governing are not always the most popular White House staff members. To make an impact they usually need forceful backing from the president, a tough chief of staff, or a vigilant White House counsel.

Rollins remembers that in the Reagan White House, the staff directory spelled out in black and white that no aide was permitted to speak to Justice Department headquarters or to independent agencies. "Only White House Counsel Fred Fielding talked to Justice," Rollins said. "We were very sensitive to the politics and the governing aspects of the game. I think it's all gotten blurred at this point in time."

In Bush's case with the fired U.S. attorneys, Rove aide Scott Jennings, a White House political deputy, thought nothing of using e-mail to contact the attorney general's counselors at Justice. Those communications were sent to the department from his political account at the RNC.

C. Boyden Gray, who was White House counsel under Bush's father, once infuriated James Baker, then secretary of State, by ginning up media pressure to force Baker to sell some stock that Gray believed posed a potential conflict that could embarrass the president. And eight months before the 1992 election, Gray tried to wall off George H.W. Bush's re-election campaign officials -- including Charlie Black and Fred Malek, men who maintained lucrative outside business relationships -- from high-level White House policy makers and from policy meetings.

Prompted by attack ads paid for by Pat Buchanan, a Bush opponent, Gray set up a communications system that funneled all contacts with the campaign team through then-Chief of Staff Samuel Skinner. Gray told reporters he wanted to make sure "they do not have the power to execute anything.... They are not making policy."

Panetta remembers, as chief of staff, threatening Clinton with his resignation if the president would not agree to a new firewall. At the time, Clinton thought he needed outside help from Dick Morris, a freewheeling Republican political consultant who was viewed with suspicion by most Democrats and especially by the White House staff. Panetta had discovered that Morris was secretly contacting Clinton's aides about policy issues, outside of the White House chain of command.

The chief of staff set Morris straight, barring him without exception, for example, from involvement in foreign policy. But he also had to lay down some law with his boss. "I told the president, 'I cannot act as your chief of staff in a situation where a political adviser is going to be interfering with my authority,' " Panetta recalled. He told Clinton that without such backing, he would lose a chief of staff. "And the president agreed. Clinton knew what Morris was like."

In or Out?

The Morris example is one reason presidents historically have found it more advantageous to put their closest political advisers on staff, giving them the authority and White House structure to influence events. Although Rove had been an outside political consultant to Bush when he served as Texas governor, he coveted a White House staff role when Bush was inaugurated. "This is what he dreamed of all his life," a former colleague said of Rove's ambitions to advise a president from the West Wing.

The good-government rationale for putting political advisers on the White House payroll is the checks on possible misbehavior: independent scrutiny of conflicts of interest, or any national security risks; application of ethics rules and requirements for annual financial disclosure; and a ban on post-employment lobbying, plus mandates to preserve presidential communications about official business.

In his 2000 book, The White House Staff: Inside the West Wing and Beyond, political scientist Bradley Patterson wrote that political advisers who are volunteers or paid by others tend to spend their time trying to push information inside, to the Oval Office, while presidents' on-staff political advisers work to reach outside the White House to bring feedback to the president from various constituencies.

Because Reagan's aides thought of the president as a man who did not spend a lot of time talking politics, his Office of Political Affairs maintained a somewhat separatist air about its business around the White House. Rollins recalled that during Reagan's re-election campaign, the office effectively shut down and moved to the campaign. Fielding issued a memo that the White House staff could have no contact with the campaign other than through Rollins or Baker aide Margaret Tutwiler. "We kept very much at arm's length," he said.

The notion now seems quaint. "I always worried about doing damage to the president, which is the critical thing," Rollins said. Republicans controlled the Senate at the time, but Democrats controlled the House, and Rollins said he feared the harsh scrutiny of the opposing party, working with a vigorous Fourth Estate.

Congressional investigations are a powerful form of oversight. But if the president is in a strong position with the public, he can withstand the scrutiny.

More than three decades ago, Nixon's organizational changes and his expansion of the White House staff to a bloated 560 people raised alarms among Democrats in Congress. Lawmakers held hearings, examined the White House appropriations and a $1.5 million "Special Projects fund," and ordered up federal audits. They made close studies of where Nixon spent taxpayer dollars for political purposes, and Ralph Nader and Public Citizen filed suit to recover more than $10,000 paid to White House aides who they claimed were working for Nixon's re-election.

But at the time, Nixon's critics in Congress confessed to utter frustration that their complaints had little impact on the president. On the Senate floor in September 1970, Sen. Ralph Yarborough, D-Texas, assailed Nixon's jumbo-sized staff and observed that "apparently, there is a long-standing understanding that they do not question our appropriations request as it pertains to the Congress, and we do not stop their appropriations."

Critics of the Bush White House and its politicization of governance argue that self-policing has to be the first check on overreach, followed by external oversight -- from Congress, the courts, and an aggressive media. After that, remedies are up to the voters.

Political scientist Tenpas predicts that Bush's successor will balk at replicating the current model. "I think the Office of Strategic Initiatives will go," she said. "It was created for Rove, and I don't know who the next president is going to be, but he or she is not going to hire someone like Karl Rove."

The next president is more likely to search out "a hybrid," she said, meaning an adviser "with suitable skills to governing and campaigning."

The lesson after eight years with the Bush administration may be that hiding the political Wizard of Oz behind a sturdy curtain has advantages. "It is dangerous to reveal the degree to which you really care about politics if you're president," Tenpas added, "because the American people don't want to know the degree to which presidents care about polls, focus groups, strategists, and the political calculus for presidential actions."

And despite the White House condemnations of Democratic critics as consumed in their political theatrics, the president still feels the heat when the head of the opposing national party finds an opening to turn a White House aide into a juicy political target.

"The Bush White House continued to put partisan politics ahead of the interests of the American people when it fired U.S. attorneys and inserted politics into ongoing criminal prosecutions," Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said in March while calling for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's resignation. "Karl Rove should pack his bags and go, too. His type of leadership doesn't belong in the White House."

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Executive branch courts Hill staffers left jobless after elections

Alexis Simendinger — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500

History suggests that administrations at the end of their second terms calcify with chronic vacancies, "acting" appointees, and political nominees who are promoted above their C.V.'s because of their long-standing loyalty. Political scientists and veteran recruiters said the Bush workforce is slipping into a churning phase where savvy officials leap back to the private sector and the junior assistant deputies move up.

Ironically, the GOP's drubbing at the polls could stave off the inevitable slide, if Bush succeeds in hiring some of the best Hill staffers -- and members -- who are looking for work.

Within four days of the midterm losses, the White House Office of Presidential Personnel sent word to Republican congressional leaders that the executive branch welcomed resumes and applications from the hundreds of soon-to-be-unemployed congressional staffers. Each department and executive agency set up an expedited system of interviews that produced a first wave of job offers to Hill aides by the second week of December.

Interest in moving from the Hill to the executive branch "is high at all levels -- the member level and their staffs," explained White House Personnel Director Liza Wright during an interview last week in her sunny West Wing office. "There are some incredibly talented people that we are able to bring into our process as a result of that."

No members have yet made the leap, but newspapers have speculated that Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, and Rep. Jim Leach, R-Iowa -- both defeated on November 7 -- are candidates for the ambassador to the United Nations vacancy, or for other high posts.

The president's embattled U.N. pick, John Bolton, withdrew his name when it became clear that the Senate would not vote before his recess appointment expired this month. Counting Bolton, Bush has made 161 recess appointments since 2001, according to White House figures.

The White House has told GOP lawmakers and their staffs that it froze many political slots throughout the government before Election Day just so the administration could be ready to absorb furloughed Republicans. "They were prepared," said one senior House leadership aide, who asked not to be named.

He described a two-step process: He and other senior colleagues were invited to the White House for interviews to assess their qualifications and their policy interests before being passed along to various departments for interviews tied to specific openings.

"There are a lot of fun stories about being asked by 22-year-old boys to describe three things you've done to further the policies of President Bush, but that's OK; you have to eat some humble pie," the aide said, noting that he made his hunt for a paycheck as broad as possible because his second child is due this month. As it happened, his Hill connections led to a job with a downtown lobbying firm.

Unemployed and Labor-Resistant

A House leadership aide with only nine months of congressional experience as an executive assistant -- who also asked to speak on background -- said he had completed seven executive branch interviews since the Republicans lost their majority. Two follow-up interviews were scheduled at departments this week, and he's also had a feeler from the Homeland Security Department.

On December 8, the Labor Department offered him a legislative assistant job that pays more than his Hill post. But the 23-year-old is hesitating, even though he's heard that as many as 3,000 Republicans may be searching for work.

"It's simply that I don't want to have labor issues stamped on my resume," he explained, "because that's not really my interest." He'd like to thread his way back to Congress in a year or so, he said, and he'd prefer to gain some experience at Energy, Commerce, or Health and Human Services. "But it may be that I need something, versus waiting for something better," he conceded. His last check will be in January, and he already relies on his parents in California to underwrite some of his living expenses.

Though grateful for the Bush administration's help, the young Republican said that the president is the one who gains by offering shelter to the GOP refugees. "They are hiring people who are more qualified than they would otherwise have been able to do," he said.

Although an executive branch job may sound attractive, some Republican congressional aides who are thinking about the switch do not see the administration as Olympus, nor do they kid themselves about second-term thunderbolts. "Bush has to realize that in the next two years, it will be so hard to get things done," the young House aide said.

Wright insists that Bush's oft-stated determination to drive his agenda until the last possible moment continues to tamp down turnover and attract top people to his administration.

"Our ability to recruit now is similar to our ability a year ago," said Wright, who left a professional recruiting firm to join the Bush White House in 2003 and was chosen to head the personnel office two years later. "And I'll be honest -- if you had asked me a year ago where we would be today, I would have anticipated, because of historical precedents, that it would be harder. We still have two full years, so I think a lot of people recognize that the president still has a lot to accomplish, and he's not going to quit until that very last day. So I think some people are really turned on about that."

Wright said she is pleasantly surprised, because veterans of the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations had warned her that this would be the period when recruiting outside talent and retaining the most-experienced appointees would be difficult. She and her staff of 26 assistants are constantly hunting for candidates to keep more than 5,200 political jobs filled.

Experts say that a 15 percent vacancy rate is normal for most years of any administration, a figure that can rise to 20 or 30 percent by the end. In that context, "vacant" means that no Senate-confirmed appointee is in place, but someone else may be doing the work temporarily. Wright said that 96 percent of Bush's political posts are filled, even if temporarily, as of December.

"Right now we are still bringing in as many people from the outside as we were two, three, four years ago," she said. "We are doing some promotions from within, but I'm also proud to say we are bringing a lot of new people into the administration."

Wright cites as examples Henry Paulson Jr., whom Bush persuaded to leave Wall Street to head the Treasury Department, and Robert Gates, who agreed to give up the presidency of Texas A&M University to succeed Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon.

Paulson and Gates were two of six Cabinet-level change-ups that Wright and her staff handled in 2006. The only other top-echelon newcomer to Bush's team was former Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne, who signed on as Interior secretary.

The other shuffles were internal: Mary Peters moved up from the Federal Highway Administration to succeed retiring Democrat Norman Mineta as Transportation secretary; former Rep. Rob Portman of Ohio walked across 17th Street from the U.S. Trade Representative's Office to be director of the Office of Management and Budget; and Bush named Portman's USTR deputy, Susan Schwab, to the top trade job.

Promoting Within Team Bush

G. Calvin Mackenzie, a political scientist at Colby College in Maine, said in an interview that the final two years of a two-term presidency -- usually a tidying-up period with eyes on the history books -- is when loyalists already in the administration win promotions. That allows the White House to sidestep Senate confirmation complications and to reward the foot soldiers who have been in the trenches from the beginning.

"I admire the notion in the White House that they can still get things done, but I'm skeptical," said Mackenzie, who has written books about the political appointee process. "This is when they look around to see who's already on board, and who has earned getting a slightly better position on their resumes."

Wright does not deny that many of Bush's picks will come from inside -- she just argues that it won't start right away.

"A year from now -- I think the answer is, yes," it will be harder to recruit, she said. At a point when the White House can't find candidates eager to fill certain jobs, or when it runs out of cooperative Democratic senators willing to confirm appointees, "we are hoping we can look at our team and get people promoted from within." She added, "But only in cases where, certainly, it's warranted and the performance is there."

Bob Nash, who was President Clinton's personnel director, recalled in an interview that when it came to filling Senate-confirmed positions at the end of Clinton's second term, it was a hurdle to find top candidates who were willing to endure the paperwork filings, background checks, and financial divestitures for anything shy of a two-year assignment.

For some political jobs, "we had a lot of people who wanted to come in," Nash recalled, "but it was our assessment that they could not do the jobs." Nash wouldn't reveal names of candidates who turned down White House job feelers, or of those who ran aground in the early vetting.

Under such circumstances, some deputy assistant secretaries, special assistants, and Senior Executive Service officials assumed the reins. "They were very knowledgeable," he added, "although they may not have been the person you would have put in at the beginning."

Making it through a Senate confirmation process gives those nominees clout over Schedule C appointees, who are selected by the president but do not require congressional approval. An administration run by presidential cronies, acting supervisors, recess appointees, and Schedule C's runs the risk of operating in a kind of suspended animation.

"You don't have people who are willing to take as many chances as the person who is confirmed," Nash said. He believes that second terms -- no matter how determined the president may be to drive the executive branch until his final days in office -- are weaker simply because officials inevitably sacrifice less and focus their attention on their resumes.

The Democrats' victory in November forced obvious personnel considerations for the executive branch. Two of Bush's most criticized combatants -- Rumsfeld and Bolton -- departed. Others who were out of the limelight but clearly in senators' crosshairs also made hasty exits. For example, David Laufman withdrew on December 6 from consideration as the Defense Department's inspector general because the White House did not believe he would be confirmed. Critics said that Laufman, like the preceding IG, had a background that was too cozy with defense contractors.

Even when Republicans held all the levers of power in Washington and were inclined to honor White House personnel requests, the president encountered some problems with the quality and performance of appointees. The criticism that rained down on Michael Brown, the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, showed that slender political connections can be deadly substitutes for experience and competence.

Wright was promoted to head the White House personnel office just a month before Hurricane Katrina struck. Asked to describe the lessons she drew from Katrina, her features tensed as she prepared to give her oft-repeated answer.

"There is no doubt that a lot in that timeframe did not operate well," she said, choosing her words carefully. "It reinforced the fact that we want to ensure that the most-qualified people are leading our agencies and the federal government."

Knowing that one of the raps on Bush is his insistence on loyalty and tight White House control over the departments, Wright took pains to emphasize that the qualifications of nominees come first when she and her staff meet with him every two weeks to review personnel recommendations compiled in what is known as "The Book." By the time Bush weighs his staff's picks, aides have done the political vetting of each candidate.

That the president welcomed a professionally trained corporate recruiter with little political experience to become his personnel director should be evidence that he wants strong nominees to come into government, Wright added.

"When I first came to the White House in 2003, I interviewed with [then-Chief of Staff] Andy Card," she recalled. "He said, 'We have a great team here in Presidential Personnel, but we have something called the 500-meter problem. If our candidates don't exist within 500 meters of the White House, we don't always call them.' It can be, regardless of whatever administration is in office, a very insular environment."

Other White House aides affirmed that Wright and her team play it straight in recruiting -- but that the White House Political Affairs Office checks whether a prospect worked for Bush in his campaigns; donated money to the right candidates or to the Republican Party; is registered to vote and has voted in previous elections; or in other ways has established allegiance to the president and his agenda.

"They don't successfully keep every Democrat out, but if you have a choice between a qualified Democrat and a qualified Republican, you choose the Republican," said one former White House aide. Bush's political advisers -- Karl Rove, chief among them -- press to reward individuals who have helped Republicans.

"You can't just pick people off the street and say this person would be good for the job because of their qualifications without striking a balance," the former aide explained. "We have people we need to take care of."

Quality and Qualifications

Congressional Democrats have asserted that the quality of political appointees has declined under Bush, compared with other recent administrations. They admit, however, that as a report written for Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., put it last May, "there is no recognized metric for measuring the quality of political appointees" -- only their qualifications.

In addition to FEMA's Brown (who honed his disaster-management skills as a commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association before becoming FEMA's general counsel in 2001), Waxman and his colleagues last year questioned the experience of Julie Myers, the niece of Gen. Richard Myers, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Julie Myers's limited qualifications to become assistant secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement at Homeland Security drew bipartisan opposition and charges of cronyism because she is married to the chief of staff for DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff. The president gave Myers a recess appointment last January, giving her a year to serve without Senate confirmation.

Over six years, Bush has grown fond of the recess-appointment option as a way to circumvent congressional objections. What he will do with Democrats in charge remains to be seen. According to presidential statistics compiled by Congressional Quarterly, the first President Bush made an average of 19 recess appointments a year; Clinton made about 18 a year for his first term; and the current president averaged 26.5 a year during his first four years in the White House.

Presidents can also evade confirmation controversies and prevent prolonged vacancies by naming acting administrators. That phenomenon is expected to be on the upswing next year as Democrats assert themselves and as recruits for Senate-confirmed jobs become more skittish about undergoing the process.

In the last year, for example, the president installed Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach as acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration while allowing him to keep his post as director of the National Cancer Institute. Some lawmakers from both parties called the doubling-up a clear conflict of interest, and he eventually left NCI. The GOP-led Senate finally voted to confirm von Eschenbach at the FDA as one of its final acts this month.

The U.S. surgeon general, Rear Adm. Kenneth Moritsugu, is on his second tour as "acting," filling in after the low-profile Surgeon General Richard Carmona departed this year. Moritsugu, who became deputy surgeon general in 1998, is a good example of a career official who keeps the trains running.

Meanwhile, the White House has not yet found a successor for Mark McClellan as head of HHS's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. McClellan, a medical doctor and economist who is a close Bush associate from Texas and the brother of former White House press secretary Scott McClellan, resigned in September after also serving in the White House and at the FDA.

At the White House, officials are preparing to name yet another wave of midlevel presidential advisers. Aides who stayed through the midterm elections are quietly searching for work in the private sector while their president remains in the Oval Office and their connections still carry some weight.

Bush's director of intergovernmental affairs, Ruben Barrales, is heading back to California to work for the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce. The director of public liaison, Rhonda Keenum, who has small children and whose husband was confirmed on December 9 as an Agriculture Department undersecretary, is thinking about a more lucrative private-sector position, as are some of the "strategery" aides in Rove's domain, including those in the political-affairs office, sources report.

Rove has revealed nothing definitive about his future -- except to appear closely engaged with the fine print of Bush's agenda heading into the homestretch. Asked about his plans for the new year, Rove replied: "Big think."

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White House chief's notebook raises question: What's a 'record'?

Alexis Simendinger — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Card, who left the White House last spring, described his "hit-by-a-bus" workbook to journalist Bob Woodward. He said he kept a roster of qualified candidates in a blue spiral notebook that he purchased himself, "so it wouldn't be considered a government document or presidential record that might someday be opened to history," according to Woodward's latest book, State of Denial. Although Card imagined his notebook would be for his eyes only, he revealed its existence to Woodward, adding that his list of possible replacements for controversial Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ran to 11 names.

Experts in the legalities and mechanics of maintaining presidential records consulted by National Journal challenged Card's interpretation. Whether Card used a dime-store notebook or cocktail napkins, or believed his notebook was personal rather than government property, such qualifiers were irrelevant to the document's definition as a presidential record that should be preserved and archived for historical purposes.

"In this case, it was a conscious effort to try to get around the statute," said Scott Nelson, senior attorney with the Public Citizen Litigation Group. The idea that a notebook purchased privately might serve as a shield from the law "is just ridiculous," Nelson added, because of Card's own description of how he intended to use his personnel lists. "The definition of presidential records includes documents created by members of the president's immediate staff for the purposes of carrying out their official duties."

Although interpretations such as Card's have never been tested in court and no independent policing exists in real time, the general legal guidance offered to White House staffers at the start of each administration (including by then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales early in 2001) is that if a document is drafted for use by the government -- whether actually used or not -- it would still be a presidential record based on its intended use.

Card, caught between a boast of being well prepared as chief of staff and a dubious legal embrace of a once-secret notebook, explained to MSNBC this week, "I felt very strongly that the president should be prepared to make changes in case somebody got hit by a bus. And so it included every senior staff position at the White House, including the chief of staff's position and all of the positions in the Cabinet."

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Treasury secretary’s vulnerabilities fall into the spotlight

Alexis Simendinger — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0400

And that will be a shame, because if there is a defining moment to sum up loyal service to a president, especially from the finance chief of the most powerful democracy in the world, it might have occurred during the re-election fury of 2004. During drive-time hours that spring, Snow did as he was told and donned headphones to share some gab about the economy with talk-radio personality Kercheval, who hosts a two-hour program for West Virginia Metro News Network.

"Good to be with you, Hoppy!" the secretary said with persuasive warmth after walking the radio jock through the nuances of West Virginia's improving employment picture and after reminding listeners that the president's tax cuts were the "oxygen" fueling the recovery.

Or perhaps Snow's good-soldier doggedness was most prominently on display when he spent precious hours in 2005 pitching Bush's doomed Social Security accounts to high school students -- not exactly a big voting bloc or a demographic contemplating retirement. "Well, the utility of talking about the subject is that the subject is awfully important," Snow told National Journal last spring. And yet, according to some conservatives, Snow's failing is that he hasn't delivered the message that the U.S. economy is cruising nicely -- thanks to George W. Bush. The Gallup Organization reports that Bush's approval rating on the economy is hovering around 40 percent, according to five surveys conducted since December. That's up from even bleaker Gallup surveys last fall.

"I'm a big fan," a Washington Republican who declined to be named said of the secretary. "He understands how Washington works. I think he's respected on the Hill. He deals with members well, and he espouses the administration's line. That's a gift, and he certainly does it much better than his predecessor -- I think he's good at it." Snow, who will be 67 in August, replaced the ousted and outspoken Paul O'Neill in 2003.

Referring to Bush's senior advisers, a former White House aide familiar with Snow and the rest of the economic team said, "I just don't think they view him as the force that they think he should be, either intellectually or as a communicator. He would have been gone two years ago if they could have found a replacement."

And therein rests the awkward circumstances that drove Snow into the headlines a year ago when "sources" whispered to journalists that he was precipitously close to Bush's hand-tooled boots. Snow never budged, and word went out that the secretary had his share of defenders, including the president and Chief of Staff Andy Card, who will leave the White House on April 14.

With Card's departure and the ascension as his successor of Goldman Sachs alum Joshua Bolten, who heads the Office of Management and Budget, Snow's perceived vulnerabilities are back in the headlights.

And it did not help that the president appeared this week to leave Snow hanging in limbo. Asked Tuesday about Snow's rumored departure, Bush reminded a reporter, "Secretary Snow is here at the table." Without looking at Snow, Bush added, "I'm glad you brought him up. He has been a valuable member of my administration, and I trust his judgment and appreciate his service."

And with that, Bush said he looked forward to Bolten's "recommendations as to how to get this White House to -- for the last two and a half years of my administration -- continue to function in an effective way."

Washington lost no time in picking apart the significance of Bush's carefully selected words -- and the verb tense: "has been a valuable member." Republican sources-with-sources-close-to-the-White House said the president is pondering a new secretary who will impress business and financial titans and who can more nimbly "sell" economic news. The White House wants Americans to feel that they are prospering under the GOP's economic policies, and its masterminds think Treasury can somehow calm financial markets' gyrations under those same policies and during an expensive war.

What is nearer the truth, according to sources close to the secretary, is that Snow wants to leave after putting in his three years, which is an average tenure for a Treasury secretary, and he has privately told the White House that he hopes for a smooth transition, on Bush's terms, when a nominee can be announced. The search is still under way. "That would be like Snow," said a former administration official. "He's a gentleman. This forced-out stuff is hogwash."

Treasury spokesman Tony Fratto declined to comment.

Snow's detractors insist that he is being pushed. "The White House staff keeps leaking stories that he needs to go, hoping that he'll get the message and do the right thing and resign," said another former administration aide.

The same former White House official who has worked closely with Bush's economic team said, "They want somebody from New York City. They are looking for Wall Street experience and a good communicator, and I think beyond that, everything else is open, and I would include Democrats in that."

The problem, this former aide added, is that Bush is looking for a loyal salesman at Treasury, while his advisers continue to run economic policy out of the West Wing through Economic Adviser Al Hubbard, who graduated from business school with the president. That scenario -- of a new Treasury secretary kowtowing to an embattled second-term White House -- is not catnip to the Wall Street executives who reportedly have been approached for signs of interest in the job or who are mentioned in the press.

The names raised by Republican sources and former White House aides are mostly speculative and come from the Bush re-election campaign's top banking and financial "Rangers" and "Pioneers." They include Stanley O'Neal, chairman and chief executive of Merrill Lynch, who is a legend in GOP circles for sending a letter to his company's executives that raised nearly $280,000 in under a month for the Bush-Cheney ticket; Henry Paulson, chairman of Goldman Sachs Group, who in previous GOP administrations worked in the Pentagon and the White House and who knows Vice President Cheney; and John Mack, who is the chairman and chief executive of Morgan Stanley.

Richard Parsons, the chief executive of Time Warner and the co-chairman of Bush's 2001 Social Security reform commission, turned down a White House entreaty, according to news reports. Paulson's colleagues told reporters that he had not been approached but said their boss had told them he wasn't interested. Mack told employees this week that he is staying put, according to a newswire. "O'Neal," one GOP source said in an interview, "would be a grand slam. He is a very impressive guy." Democrats agreed in interviews this week that O'Neal, who has been with Merrill Lynch since 1986, would be a "get" -- but said he would not consent to being a figurehead in any administration.

"They are going to have to make it more attractive," said the former Bush aide who knows the president's economic team. While no Bush Cabinet secretary has carte blanche to operate outside of West Wing supervision, "the White House could be less hands-on with someone they viewed as the kind of person they are looking for, someone with significant Wall Street and business acumen," he added.

But economists and business leaders suggest that getting a stellar secretary to succeed Snow is a challenge, and not just because Bush's team is insular or because conservatives have talked themselves into believing that a Treasury secretary's job is to somehow persuade voters that economic growth should make them feel better about their stagnant wages.

"There are elements and threads of things they want to do," said Alan D. Levenson, the chief economist for T. Rowe Price Associates, who added that if the president doesn't make an economic policy message a priority, that handicaps any Treasury secretary. "What's the plan? What are the problems? What happened to addressing poverty and the racial dimension that Bush spoke so movingly about in the wake of Hurricane Katrina?"

W. Bowman Cutter, a co-chairman of the Committee for Economic Development and a Democrat who served in the White House during President Clinton's first term, said in an interview that the current political and global climate would give any CEO pause. Cutter said a modest but nevertheless important achievement for the next Treasury secretary would be to help detoxify the partisan atmosphere in Washington so that a future president can tackle the big problems that inevitably require bipartisanship. And from that standpoint, picking someone from Wall Street may be a smart move, he said, because the financial sector may harbor the last remnants of centrism.

"If you're in the middle of a deteriorating war that's unpopular in much of the rest of the world, and the political atmosphere is as poisonous as it is, if you're Treasury secretary, you're not going to get much done."

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OMB deputy unlikely to move up to top slot

Alexis Simendinger — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0400

OMB's deputy for management, longtime Bush friend Clay Johnson, is great at the "M" part of the enterprise, and will stay put, Bolten said. Deputy Director Joel Kaplan, a real talent at age 36, will be essential to the next director.

Incoming Chief of Staff Bolten admits he's not a rise-and-shine guy, barely making it in for those 7:30 a.m. meetings at the White House in service to a president who's decidedly a morning person. Current Chief of Staff Andrew Card starts his workday at 5:30 a.m.

"I know Andy gets here really early every day," the president told Bolten. "I don't know why he does that."

Bolten, who left the dining room with a small group that included old friend and Republican stalwart Bo Derek, hinted that the next budget director will have the political chops to satisfy Capitol Hill as well as the budget know-how any director needs.

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Disaster response threatens to swamp Bush administration

Alexis Simendinger — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

The president's nine-minute enumeration of federal help for victims of Katrina -- including release of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve -- carried the whiff of bureaucracy still assembling its clipboards. The New York Times condemned Bush's talk as "one of the worst speeches of his life" and said that his appearance "a day later than he was needed ... seems to be a ritual in this administration." Bush was forced to speak about what would be coming to survivors. But the television cameras were three days ahead of him.

Journalists who waded through the carnage in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama depicted a catastrophe made more dire because local, state, and federal responders were overwhelmed. CNN's Anderson Cooper, fresh from reporting on famine in Africa, conducted a testy interview from Mississippi with the bleary-eyed director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and challenged him to explain why air-drops of food and water had not arrived.

Fox News Network's reporter, with microphone in hand on a New Orleans overpass, kept the cameras rolling as his crew flagged down a police officer and pleaded with him to drive a visibly exhausted mother and her feverish five-day-old infant to medical aid. The FNN correspondent told a somber Brit Hume at the anchor desk that rescuers had plucked the pair from flooded public housing and simply deposited them on the chaotic roadway, with no water, transportation, or advice about where to go. And that mother and child were among thousands.

By Thursday, the White House press corps pounded press secretary Scott McClellan to explain why the federal response to the dire hardships of hundreds of thousands of Americans came late and appeared poorly planned. McClellan disputed such assertions.

For U.S. presidents, there is an unwritten rule book for disaster recovery, and the first rule is, "Act fast." The second rule is, "Send it all," because local and state officials are often reluctant to admit they need help. And the third rule is that presidents are expected to "explain and console." President Clinton and his FEMA director, James Lee Witt, were acknowledged masters. It was George H.W. Bush, with Hurricanes Hugo in 1989 and Andrew in 1992, who provided painful lessons about the feds' bureaucratic intransigence and deference to local officials.

"President Clinton learned what happened and never let it happen again," recalled Marlin Fitzwater, former press secretary to Presidents Bush and Reagan. "And the good part is that they learned it for all time and for all the presidents."

The senior President Bush was not callous to disasters: A severe storm in 1991 gutted his family home in Maine, and the Atlantic swallowed its contents. But he failed to anticipate that his administration was part of the problem. FEMA had been criticized for a sluggish response after Hugo, which struck the Carolinas and claimed 86 lives. By the time Andrew destroyed more than 100,000 Florida homes two months before the 1992 election, the vulnerabilities of FEMA (which at the time required governors to first request aid) conspired with the shortsightedness of Florida's Gov. Lawton Chiles (who initially refused to make the request) to give Bush a black eye.

Fitzwater said that Clinton rightly went to school on Bush's mistakes. "He, as president, could not afford to wait on governors to develop the response and to make the requests," Fitzwater said. "If you waited a day or two or three, you were too late. You have to get on the ground immediately -- and not with checks, but with tents and with food and water."

To deliver resources through heftier departments such as Defense, FEMA must seize the president's attention before disasters happen, said Jane Bullock, who worked at FEMA under five presidents before becoming Witt's chief of staff. Clinton -- who experienced natural calamities during a dozen years as governor of a small, poor state -- "recognized that people expected their government to be there in a disaster," she said.

When government help proves a balm for victims, it can also be a balm for presidents. With his poll numbers at their lowest ebb, the current President Bush has been playing defense. "Every time we had a disaster, President Clinton's poll numbers went up," Bullock added. "They gave him a venue where he was at his best."

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Top Bush aides get small pay boost

Alexis Simendinger — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 00:00:00 -0400

National Journal.

The top salary, paid to 19 aides, is up $4,000 from last year, barely matching the annual inflation rate. At the low end of the pecking order, some young staff assistants and correspondence aides earn $30,000 for the honor of sitting on the fringes of history.

Others among President Bush's highest paid advisers are Claude Allen, head of domestic policy; Counselor Dan Bartlett; Jack Crouch, deputy at the National Security Council; Nicolle Devenish, who succeeded Bartlett as head of communications; Michael Gerson, assistant for policy and strategic planning; Stephen Hadley, head of the NSC; Joe Hagin, deputy chief of staff; Al Hubbard, National Economic Council director; and Brett Kavanaugh, White House staff secretary.

Also compensated as assistants to Bush are I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to the vice president; Scott McClellan, press secretary; William McGurn, chief speechwriter; Harriet Miers, White House counsel; Jim Towey, director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives; Fran Townsend, homeland security and counter-terrorism director; and Liza Wright, the new head of presidential personnel.

The full list is available at Nationaljournal.com.

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Cabinet secretaries get White House office space

Alexis Simendinger — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Heidi Marquez Smith, who was director of presidential correspondence before her promotion to special assistant to Bush, will head the five-person Cabinet Liaison Office. Shortly after Smith took the reins on February 24, Card convened the Cabinet in its new conference suite on the first floor of the EEOB and encouraged the members to conduct regular business there. The conference room, with sophisticated audiovisual capabilities, seats 17. An adjoining office is sized for one visiting honcho.

The White House says that all Cabinet members have used the space already. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns, who is learning the D.C. ropes, schedules his White House office hours every Tuesday afternoon.

The Cabinet heads, particularly the nine newcomers, can use the opportunity to meet with Bush's senior advisers, attend West Wing meetings, eat in the White House mess, and hold meetings with interest groups and constituents in a more dazzling setting than their offices across town.

White House officials explain that Card wanted Bush's lieutenants to work face-to-face with his tightly knit West Wing team, especially because the president holds formal Cabinet meetings only four or five times a year.

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Bush's A-list: Who gets the top salaries?

Alexis Simendinger — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0500

The 2005 list promotes three people and downgrades one White House post from assistant to deputy -- that of director of Bush's USA Freedom Corps -- following the departure of John Bridgeland. Last year, senior aides each earned $157,000 a year -- about 11 percent less than Cabinet secretaries and 3 percent less than members of Congress. This year's salaries will not be made public until June, White House spokeswoman Erin Healy said.

"When Republicans come into the White House, they are sensitive to the need to leave room for promotion and salary increases," said presidential scholar Martha Joynt Kumar of Towson University, who has studied White House transitions and staff organizations.

The current list, compiled by National Journal and fact-checked by the White House:

Andrew Card, chief of staff
Karl Rove, deputy chief of staff and senior adviser
Joseph Hagin, deputy chief of staff for operations
Dan Bartlett, counselor
Nicolle Devenish, communications director
Stephen Hadley, national security adviser
Jack Dyer Crouch II, national security deputy
Al Hubbard, National Economic Council director
Claude Allen, Domestic Policy Council director
Harriet Miers, counsel
Candida Wolff, legislative-affairs director
Michael Gerson, policy and strategic planning
William McGurn, speechwriting director
Scott McClellan, press secretary
Frances Townsend, homeland-security adviser
Jim Towey, Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives director
Dina Powell, personnel director
Brett Kavanaugh, staff secretary
Lewis (Scooter) Libby, vice president's chief of staff

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Bush likely to promote from within if reelected

Alexis Simendinger — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Top White House Staff

Bush's CEO-style presidency sets policies in the West Wing, and in every corner of the executive branch. He delegates the mechanics of governing to his lieutenants -- who are working for him down the hall, not across town.Of the 20 Cabinet-level posts in Bush's administration, the chief of staff, the budget director, the trade ambassador, and the drug-policy czar are the White House employees who have been elevated to Cabinet rank. The president's senior adviser, Karl Rove, had more say over steel tariffs, for instance, than did U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick or the Commerce Department. Education specialist and domestic policy adviser Margaret Spellings, who arrived in Washington with Bush from Texas, has arguably had more influence over education policy in the first term than did Secretary Roderick Paige. Tom Ridge may know what homeland-security protection should cost the taxpayers, but the budget director and Vice President Cheney, who heads the budget review board for the president, have the final say over how much the Homeland Security Department receives. Colin Powell may want to sway the president on affairs of state, but first, he has to run the traps with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who is one of Bush's near-constant companions and his gatekeeper of all international policy-making.Ask Card whether he wants to stay or go after the election, and he gives the same response he's been offering for four years: "If I don't have 100 percent of [Bush's] confidence, I should not be his chief of staff. Unfortunately, I might not be the first person to realize I don't have 100 percent of his confidence," he says. "I have no expectation that I will or will not serve the president when he's re-elected." Card is so practiced at his answer because he gets asked so often: Four years in the post is considered amazing by the standards of the grueling modern White House. His workday begins at 5:30 a.m. and ends more than half a day later -- at least six days a week. Instead of signals that he wants out, there have been hints that Card may have the record books in mind. He once tasked his staff to research the average tenure of White House chiefs of staff. Answer? Twenty-two months. For those wondering whether Rove expects to remain inside the White House if Bush wins, the answer is decidedly, absolutely, most definitely yes, his colleagues say. "He's thinking about Bush's legacy," not his next client, one source said.There is no certain opinion about whether or how the president might adjust his communications operation in a second term. Some GOP observers outside the White House wish he would make a few changes, but insiders say Bush's fondness for "old shoes" extends to young Texans he enjoys being around, such as Communications Director Dan Bartlett and press secretary Scott McClellan. Bartlett, who has adopted the top-down, lips-zipped policies that counselor Karen Hughes installed in Bush's first two years, has worked for two men in his adult life -- Rove and Bush.White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales reportedly has had enough after four years and is looking for a change. Gonzales has been touted as Bush's first choice for a Supreme Court vacancy (see p. 3211), yet there is speculation that the range of sticky issues he tackled for the president in the White House could make confirmation difficult. If Gonzales leaves, one of his current or former deputies could be promoted. Brett Kavanaugh, Bush's current staff secretary and the president's pending nominee to the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, has been mentioned.

National Security Team

Defense Secretary -- It is hard to find anyone inside the White House or close to the political center at the Pentagon who believes that Bush will ask Donald Rumsfeld to leave the job he's held twice in his life, in the middle of a war, and even despite his 72 years. And very few expect the flinty, driven secretary to throw in the towel now. "For all his mistakes, Rumsfeld remains indispensable to the president's military agenda," said Loren Thompson, an analyst at the Lexington Institute who consults for defense contractors. "He is the primary author of military transformation, and almost every facet of success for that very ambitious concept is tied to his energy and his stature. I just don't see anybody stepping into Rumsfeld's shoes convincingly as an agent of change in the Pentagon." Secretary of State -- A recent flurry of published comments from Colin Powell and President Bush suggests that each is warmly thinking about a longer-term relationship in their current jobs. But the more-conventional wisdom that Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, are poised to depart is correct, according to a former White House official. "Watch how John Danforth does at the United Nations," this source replied when asked who might succeed Powell. The former Missouri senator and ordained Episcopal minister, recently named by Bush to be U.N. ambassador, is a true conservative whom Democrats embrace for his intelligence and integrity. Although plenty of reports have speculated that Condoleezza Rice could succeed Powell, Rice's current and former colleagues insist she has little interest in the administrative challenges within the State Department culture. National Security Adviser -- Despite outsiders' criticisms that she has been a poor manager of outsized egos and conflicting intelligence -- to the detriment of the president's foreign policy -- Condoleezza Rice's anticipated departure is viewed as entirely voluntary. "I would be surprised if she stayed in her current job," a senior White House official said. Friends believe that Rice wants to return to California, perhaps to academia, while others suggest that Bush will not want her to stray that far. Although her interest in Defense once made administration officials ponder Rice's history-making potential at the Pentagon, her mistakes leading up to and beyond 9/11 leave even her stalwart fans wondering whether she could win confirmation for such a job. Leading candidates to succeed Rice, no matter where she might go, include her deputy, Stephen Hadley ("the president has a lot of confidence in him," according to the White House official), and Robert Blackwill, Rice's coordinator for strategic planning at the National Security Council. Director of Central Intelligence/Director of National Intelligence -- Porter Goss recently replaced George Tenet as CIA director. But the job of director of central intelligence is being turned into the (theoretically) more powerful post of director of national intelligence. The consensus speculation is that Goss will move up, leaving Bush to fill the CIA post again. But uncertainty lingers. "They'll need someone who is very familiar with the budget process and the political interplay between the administration, the intelligence community, the military establishment, and the oversight committees in Congress," said one lawyer with close ties to the Bush administration and to the intelligence world. The lawyer suggested that White House Chief of Staff Andy Card or Office of Management and Budget Director Joshua B. Bolten might be superior candidates for DNI. Under the scenario in which Goss is promoted, the betting is on Frances Fragos Townsend, the president's White House adviser on homeland security, to become the first female director of central intelligence.Attorney General -- John Ashcroft, while useful to the president among his socially conservative base in an election year, may be expendable after re-election to appease Republicans who believe he has almost single-handedly hurt the party's reputation on immigration and civil liberties. At any rate, the debate remains over whether Ashcroft wants to leave, or Bush wants to nudge him out. Either way, the expectation is that the president may embrace a new figure to fight crime and terror and help reauthorize the USA PATRIOT Act. Names include Larry Thompson, Ashcroft's first deputy AG who just began a new job as senior vice president and general counsel at PepsiCo. He is well regarded inside the White House and could calm the department culture, but he would not be a partisan firebrand, if that's what Bush seeks in that job. Thompson, if confirmed, would be the first African-American attorney general. Mark Racicot, a former Montana governor and a top choice for AG in 2000, is high on any GOP list, in part because of his loyal and frequently broadcast services as chairman of Bush-Cheney '04. In an interview with National Journal, Racicot said he has promised his law firm he will come back after the election and prefers to be deleted from Cabinet lists. Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a tough former prosecutor in his hometown, is on Republicans' wish list for a wide array of posts, but his freedom and lucrative new business career are probably more appealing than any job in Washington could be. Former Justice officials have suggested White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, who, according to one former administration official, wants the AG post more than he wants to sit on the Supreme Court. Bill Pryor, former Alabama attorney general and a recess appointment to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, would be the darling of the Christian Right as attorney general. He once called Roe v. Wade "the worst abomination in the history of constitutional law." That's part of why he's unlikely to get past Senate Democrats and onto the appeals bench. Homeland Security Secretary -- The question seems to be whether Tom Ridge is ready to leave the administration to join a major consulting firm, or whether Bush might want him to stay in the administration. Smart and knowledgeable sources believe the odds are that he departs but that external events could change his mind. If Ridge goes, his undersecretary, Asa Hutchinson, has been publicly eager for the top job. Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney parlayed his experience heading security at the Salt Lake City Olympics into homeland-security expertise, including intelligence and information-gathering. He impressed Homeland Security Department officials and the White House in the process. Republicans and Democrats tout Thomas Kean, former New Jersey governor and the recent co-chairman of the 9/11 commission, as a public servant who would be stellar in almost any Cabinet post, including Homeland Security. Kean will retire from the presidency of Drew University next spring, around the time he celebrates his 70th birthday. Bernard Kerik campaigned hard for Bush in his capacity as former police commissioner of New York City, and he spoke at the president's New York convention. One source said Kerik would welcome an invitation to join a second term. Chairman of the House Select Committee on Homeland Security Christopher Cox finds himself tacked onto the list by some sources familiar with the department, but they remain unsure of Bush's sentiments and of Cox's thoughts about leaving his California congressional seat.

Economic Team

Treasury Secretary -- Insiders believe that Secretary John Snow will stay where he is, at least for another year or so. If Bush wants an overhaul of the tax code to be his domestic plum in a second term, he and his advisers have faith that Snow, who replaced Paul O'Neill, can be effective in that effort. "Snow is staying," a senior White House official said. "The president thinks he's doing a good job." Commerce Secretary -- Bush friend Donald Evans has declined to say what he intends to do after the election, but a former White House official said Evans is definitely leaving Commerce. Evans's wife has moved back to Texas, and his son intends to finish school there, according to current and former White House officials. Among some Washington lobbyists, the speculation has been that Bush might ask Evans to be his next chief of staff, though they don't see Evans as the right fit for the job, as Bush has defined it. "My betting would be against it," says one K Street source close to the White House. "I think Don is an outside person." Others suggest that the president would want to keep his friend around in some role. The leading name to succeed Evans at Commerce is Mercer Reynolds III, the finance chairman of the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign. "I think he wants it, and he's a logical choice for the job," another well-connected lobbyist said.Office of Management and Budget Director -- Joshua B. Bolten is definitely staying in the administration if Bush is re-elected, a senior White House official says, and if Bush wants him to stay put at OMB, he will. If Treasury is not John Snow's post for some reason, Bolten is a prospect there, and some have mentioned him as a chief-of-staff-in-waiting, since he served as Andy Card's deputy. As for who might replace Bolten, there are few guesses, since a change is not widely expected. Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth says he is itching to get Bolten out ("he's more of a political guy") and wants a real "warrior for smaller government" installed in his place. His suggestion: Donna Arduin, who has made a name for herself as a budget expert in Michigan, in Florida, and currently in California under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Asked whether Bush really wants to slash spending in a second term, as conservatives urge, Moore said, "I'd like to say yes, but I don't think this is an administration that is anti-Big Government." U.S. Trade Representative -- The prevailing assumption is that Robert Zoellick is leaving, but the guesswork about a successor is just that -- guessing. The USTR job is often a catch-all perch for defeated members of Congress or campaign advisers who didn't make the cut elsewhere in the Cabinet. In the grab bag of names: Grant Aldonas, currently undersecretary of Commerce for international trade and a former chief trade counsel on the Senate Finance Committee; and Gary Edson, former deputy assistant to the president for international economic affairs.

Domestic Policy

Health and Human Services Secretary -- Secretary Tommy Thompson initially found the job of running a federal department a tad less fulfilling than running a state, which he did in Wisconsin, but his enthusiasm increased once he settled in. Before the Medicare prescription drug measure was enacted this year, the oddsmakers were saying Thompson was headed into the private sector to make the first real money of his life. But confidants began suggesting that Bush might persuade him to stay at HHS, at least for a transition period, or even to head Transportation, which Thompson once thought he wanted. But Transportation has been so altered by the Department of Homeland Security, one Thompson friend suggested, that it is no longer the same department it was three years ago. A source close to the secretary says that Thompson, if he stays with Bush, now has his eyes on DHS if Tom Ridge departs. Possible successors are HHS deputy secretary Claude Allen, whom friends see as a proven manager who could pick up smoothly where Thompson leaves off, and Mark McClellan, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a young standout in job after job. McClellan, a physician and an economist whose brother is White House press secretary Scott McClellan, started with Bush as a policy adviser in the White House and was promoted to lead the Food and Drug Administration. Gail Wilensky, a senior fellow at international humanitarian group Project HOPE who ran Medicare and was a top health care adviser to Bush 41, was runner-up for the HHS job in 2000. William Roper, dean of the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), is another former Medicare administrator. He ran the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under Bush 41 and has served as an adviser to Bush 43 in both of his presidential bids. Out in the states, HHS names include New York Gov. George Pataki (if he decides not to run for president in 2008), Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne, and Colorado Gov. Bill Owens.Education Secretary -- The education establishment widely expects Roderick Paige, 71, to step down. White House education adviser Margaret Spellings has the job locked up, various sources inside and outside government report. Other suggestions gathered in interviews: former Pennsylvania schools chief Eugene Hickok, now Paige's deputy; Los Angeles schools superintendent and former Democratic governor of Colorado Roy Romer; former Michigan Gov. John Engler; Bush education adviser Sandy Kress (a more likely candidate to fill Spellings's vacancy if it emerges at the White House); and Education Department official and former Arkansas schools chief Ray Simon. Transportation Secretary -- Norman Mineta, the lone Democrat in Bush's Cabinet, plans to leave in January, according to a senior White House official and department-watchers. At 72, with some health problems behind him, Mineta may have caught wind that Labor Secretary Elaine Chao and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham reportedly fancy his job. Chao was deputy transportation secretary under George H.W. Bush. Michael P. Jackson, Mineta's first deputy at Transportation, could be a favorite of former Transportation Secretary Andy Card, for whom Jackson once worked. Jackson is now with the private-sector engineering firm Aecom, and colleagues say he seems content there but could be swayed by a call from Bush. If the president opts to promote from within the department, Federal Aviation Administration chief Marion Blakey is a candidate, though she would face opposition from unions after tussles over privatization of federal jobs. Two other possibilities: Federal Highway Administrator Mary Peters, the former Arizona transportation secretary; and former Texas Transportation Commission chief David Laney. Labor Secretary -- "It was no secret that the Department of Labor was not her first choice; she wanted DOT," one industry source said of Secretary Elaine Chao. Some see her help campaigning for Bush this year as a good-soldier effort to keep a hand in beyond Election Day, perhaps for that Transportation move. If Chao departs, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chair Cari M. Dominguez, and George Salem, Labor's chief legal officer during the Reagan administration, are candidates to watch.Agriculture Secretary -- No Cabinet secretary has seemed to relish denouncing John Kerry as a flip-flopper quite as much as Secretary Ann Veneman has, on her travels for the president this year, doling out millions of dollars in federal grants. "Agriculture Secretary Campaigns to Keep Job," read a Reuters headline on October 17. Veneman-watchers differ about whether she is actually miserable or "at home" at Ag, torn between her strengths (farm-trade negotiations; swift response to the first U.S. mad-cow case) and her weaknesses (farm bill flop; criticism over imported Canadian beef). If Veneman departs, farm lobbyists and others interviewed offer this list of prospects: Charles Kruze, president of the Missouri Farm Bureau (described as Karl Rove's "favorite farmer"); Allen Johnson, chief agriculture trade negotiator at the Office of the United States Trade Representative; Bill Hawks, undersecretary of agriculture for marketing; John Thune, if he loses his Senate bid in South Dakota; Texas Democrat Charles Stenholm, if he loses his House re-election bid, although some Republicans said he was passed over in 2000; and Bruce Knight, former wheat and corn lobbyist and chief of the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator -- Many industry sources and knowledgeable observers in the environmental community anticipate that Administrator Mike Leavitt, who succeeded Christie Todd Whitman more than a year ago, would remain in a second term. One sign that he'd like to stay in the administration: He moved his family to Washington from Utah. "He's a good, smart guy who knows how to work the system," said one agriculture lobbyist. "He'll stay because he just got there." Energy Secretary -- Spencer Abraham will be replaced, or at least that's the consensus among lobbyists and interest groups with Energy Department business. Some blame Abraham, whom some industry lobbyists describe as difficult to work with and an ineffective representative of Bush's energy policies, for Congress's failure to pass the president's (and Vice President Cheney's) energy bill. "It's hard to be secretary of Energy and have Cheney run energy policy," one slightly sympathetic lobbyist said. Speculation is that a Republican who loses his or her race in November could succeed Abraham. Other ideas: Edison Electric Institute President Tom Kuhn, who attended Yale with Bush and raised plenty of campaign dough for his friend; Rep. Heather Wilson (the suggestion of one environmental lobbyist, who noted that many of the federal national laboratories within the department are located in Wilson's home state of New Mexico); and Tony Garza, currently the U.S. ambassador to Mexico.Interior Secretary -- Gale Norton is widely perceived as someone who has done the White House's bidding, avoided ugly publicity, and built strong industry alliances. "There's a pretty good likelihood that she'd be asked to stay on, because Interior hasn't caused [the White House] a significant amount of trouble," one energy lobbyist offered. The only caveat is a publicized suggestion that Norton is angling for a judgeship. If she leaves, speculation revolves around current and former Western governors, such as Idaho's Dirk Kempthorne or Colorado's Bill Owens. An agriculture source, however, asserted that Kempthorne irritated the White House in 2003 when he lobbied to be EPA administrator, a job that went instead to Mike Leavitt.Housing and Urban Development Secretary -- Both political parties often put mayors on their short lists to manage the challenging Department of Housing and Urban Development, but don't bet on a mayor in a second Bush term, said Bruce Katz, vice president and director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. "Former mayors are people who run things, who have been in charge," said Katz, who was chief of staff to Henry Cisneros, former Clinton HUD secretary and mayor of San Antonio. "It's hard to dictate to them." And Katz asserts that Bush is not looking for a newsmaker. "The next HUD secretary in the Bush administration will be told, 'Cut the budget and follow our direction.' " HUD observers close to housing issues expect Secretary Alphonso Jackson to stick around, at least for a year or so, in a new Bush term. Jackson, who as deputy secretary was appointed to the top spot when Mel Martinez departed in 2003 to seek a Senate seat in Florida, is a pal from Bush's Texas days. Though Jackson managed the housing authorities in Dallas and St. Louis, he is viewed as a "stopgap appointment" among housing insiders. Fights over housing choice voucher reform and further agency budget cuts will get ugly in a second Bush administration, and HUD will need a leader who can reach out to both parties. A long-shot successor if Jackson steps down is Charlotte, N.C., Mayor Patrick McCrory, president of Republican Mayors and Local Officials.Contributing to this report were Carl M. Cannon, Sydney J. Freedberg Jr., Brian Friel, Siobhan Gorman, Jerry Hagstrom, Julie Kosterlitz, Margaret Kriz, Kellie Lunney, Marilyn Werber Serafini, Paul Singer, Bruce Stokes, and Peter H. Stone. ]]>

Cabinet changes expected if Bush is re-elected

Alexis Simendinger — Thu, 02 Sep 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Those are the headlines wheedled out of well-informed White House, congressional, administration, and private-sector sources gathered for Bush's convention week in New York.

"I don't know what the turnover will be in the second term," Evans told reporters Wednesday. "People love serving the country," he said, "and love serving this president." Evans conceded, "Of course there is" burnout after four tumultuous years, "but the people who know the president best love him the most."

Although Evans said he'll contemplate his future in government "after the election," a senior White House official said the president will not be surprised if his friend is homeward bound.

Bush is widely expected to deliver an acceptance speech that sets out broad challenges, including unspecified "tax reform." And the more prominent members of his economic team are expected to remain familiar. Office of Management and Budget Director Joshua Bolten would stay, the White House official said.

"Snow is staying," the official added. "The president thinks he's doing a good job." Grover Norquist, president of the conservative Americans for Tax Reform, put it with a slightly different twist: "Snow is fine." Bush chose Snow to replace Paul O'Neill, his first Treasury secretary, in order to install a more effective salesman for tax cuts.

If major tax reform is the legislative plum that Bush wants from a second term, the Cabinet, departmental experts, and White House aides are not the essential players, Norquist argued. "It's Hastert, Frist, and the president," he said, referring to the congressional muscle of House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn. -- combined with the president's own lobbying.

Other conservatives say privately that they want Bush to appoint a more vigorous, creative economic team that inspires greater confidence among the public and the business community, and that works to cut the $400-plus-billion deficit. But the White House official said Bush got what he wanted when he made his first-term changes. "What the president really needed at that time was stability, ability, and congeniality, and that's what he has."

One economic player who might voluntarily depart is Stephen Friedman, the largely unseen director of Bush's National Economic Council. "Friedman gave up a lot," the White House official said, referring to the monetary sacrifices of entering government after being co-chairman of Goldman Sachs and serving on corporate boards.

Bush's foreign-policy team -- the most controversial in decades -- is where observers look for second-term changes. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice is expected to leave that post. "I would be surprised if she stayed in her current job," the White House official said. Her deputy, Stephen Hadley, is likely to get the promotion. "The president has a lot of confidence in him," the official added.

Although Rumsfeld's second run as Defense secretary has attracted criticism, Bush will let him stay if that's what the nearly 80-year-old warrior wants to do, sources said. "He's only halfway through his plan to reform the Pentagon," Norquist said, offering Rumsfeld a plug to re-up.

Bush is reluctant to allow Rice to depart, so he might offer her a Cabinet post. Her aides have said that Rice does not want the management headaches of the State Department, and that she might find the Pentagon more interesting, if Rumsfeld leaves. However, even Rice's admirers question whether she has the management skills to make the Pentagon job a success.

Sources said they did not know if Richard Armitage, Powell's deputy, would be happy to get out of Bush's administration or might be enticed with a promotion to stay on.

At the White House, Chief of Staff Andy Card -- who has described his job as "a calling" -- might remain, at least for a while. "It's the most interesting job he'll ever have," one observer noted. Nearly four years in that post is considered herculean. Card's office once ran the numbers: average tenure, 22 months.

"If the president asked him to stay, he would -- maybe for some months," said John Sununu, who held the job in President George H.W. Bush's administration and worked with Card. Sources added that if Card opts to depart, Bolten could be pulled in to succeed him.

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First outlines of potential Kerry Cabinet begin to take shape

Alexis Simendinger — Fri, 30 Jul 2004 00:00:00 -0400

With her on the stage were such Clinton alumni as Gene Sperling, former National Economic Council director; Roger Altman, former Treasury deputy and a Kerry friend; Robert Shapiro, a former Commerce undersecretary; and Steven Rattner, managing principal of the New York investment firm Quadrangle Group. All are likely to be on some transition leader's list to fill out John Kerry's administration if he wins in November. Kerry has not appointed a transition director, said campaign spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter, a step that Clinton aides said would come in autumn regardless of poll standings.

The question of who would help Kerry govern was a favorite parlor game at party gatherings throughout Boston this week -- played discreetly. "I hate that story," Altman said, when asked about the pool of candidates.

For this story, National Journal's Convention Daily interviewed more than a dozen individuals who are obvious candidates or have been quietly lauded by others who are helping the Kerry campaign. Nobody protested vigorously about the notion of a Washington posting, although many weren't eager to be quoted.

When asked if he would be interested in becoming Treasury secretary (a suggestion made privately by some colleagues past and present), Altman frowned deeply and dismissed the question. The investment banker -- who quit the Clinton administration a decade ago when he was accused of improperly aiding the White House during a government probe of Madison Guaranty bank -- is described by admirers as potentially vulnerable to GOP objections in the confirmation process. Other friends noted that he had heart transplant surgery several years ago and might want less stress in his life. Despite his medical history, one colleague suggested, Altman would be an effective White House chief of staff.

The trouble with such guesses, Altman said, is that Democrats' reservoir of capable public servants shouldn't be limited to folks who served under Clinton. Robert Rubin, Altman recalled, came from Goldman Sachs and had no government experience when Clinton made him his economic adviser, then Treasury secretary. His name became a gold standard for economic credibility, and, as a result, he was a favorite to succeed Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve.

Once cool to the charms of the chairman's seat, Rubin is now thought to be warmer to its allure. "How do you not want to be God?" joked Henry Cisneros, Clinton's former Housing secretary and a Rubin admirer.

Other Democrats suggested that investment banker and former Fannie Mae Chairman Jim Johnson, who managed the process that produced John Edwards as Kerry's VP pick, would covet the Treasury job, or that he might be an effective chief of staff. Democrats who think that Kerry could make history with a Treasury pick mention Tyson, who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers for Clinton, because she could become the first woman to hold that post.

Others suggested that Health and Human Services will go to a Democratic governor if Kerry wins. Franklin Raines, who served Clinton as budget director and now heads Fannie Mae, could be the first African-American Treasury secretary, some Democrats said. One source, however, thought that Raines's tenure at Fannie Mae had been "ragged" enough to knock him off a Treasury list.

Democrats in Boston mentioned Richard Holbrooke for secretary of State, in part because his interest is perceived as public. Asked if other candidates might have to battle Holbrooke to get on a list of State candidates, one former department diplomat replied, "There are a lot of them who know jujitsu."

Democrats lust for a contrast to John Ashcroft as attorney general. One informal nomination from the Boston crowd: Jamie Gorelick, who all but ran the Justice Department for Janet Reno and displayed toughness on the 9/11 commission. Another idea: Dennis Archer, the president of the American Bar Association and a former mayor of Detroit who was once a justice of the Michigan Supreme Court.

Also suggested in interviews: Rep. Dick Gephardt for Labor; retired Gen. Wesley Clark and Kerry friend Gary Hart for a range of positions; Sen. Bob Graham of Florida for United Nations ambassador; Sperling to head the Office of Management and Budget; and Kerry foreign-policy adviser Rand Beers or former State Department adviser Jamie Rubin to lead the National Security Council.

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President pulls the levers of power and privilege

Alexis Simendinger — Fri, 16 Apr 2004 00:00:00 -0400

President Bush would have much preferred that Rice keep her crisp counsel behind the iron gates of the White House -- or at least that's what every presidential aide said for a few weeks while asserting the president's right to prevent his closest advisers from being summoned to spill the beans before an entity created by Congress.

While former counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke, with his testimony in March, made the labors of the 9/11 commission sound relevant -- even essential -- to the future safety of the United States, Bush was hand-wringing about the essential relation of Article II of the Constitution to the future of the Republic. Or at least that's how it seemed to average folks who couldn't grasp the difference between Rice's offering her recollections to 60 Minutes or speaking to 10 beseeching commissioners.

Bush argued for the principle of executive privilege, until the practicalities of politics and public relations forced him to make a face-saving compromise. He unleashed Rice in exchange for the commission's written pledge that he hadn't sacrificed a thing in the way of his executive authority, or any future president's.

A Practical Pivot

That about-face echoed the same pragmatism Bush first exhibited when he resisted Democratic-proposed tax-rebate checks and then embraced them as his own. Or when he initially thought his own homeland-security adviser was a better fix for bureaucratic confusion than a Homeland Security Department would be, until it was clear Congress was going to create a department -- after which the president jumped in front of lawmakers with his own secretly hatched proposal. And it was the same practical pivot Bush executed when he initially thought he might take the nation to war on his own say-so, without a congressional vote of support, only to reverse course and say he had always intended to come to Congress for backing.

Bush's surrender to the commission over Rice's testimony -- not to mention the "conversation" he'll have with the 9/11 panel sometime in the coming weeks, when he will be accompanied by Vice President Dick Cheney -- ceded some of the executive control that the Bush White House has generally fought to preserve. Bush did what a lot of assertive presidents appear hardwired to do: He argued that it was not just his idea, but a victory. "I made a decision to allow her" to testify, Bush said, "because I was assured that it would not jeopardize executive privilege."

White House Chief of Staff Andy Card told National Journal in an interview a few days before Rice's appearance that Clarke's testimony, Clarke's best-selling insider's take on the White House, and the attendant media coverage fueled "a different dynamic," which persuaded Bush to compromise. Card dismissed Clarke's public contributions as "a show" and said that Clarke's publishers "used" the commissioners to sell books.

Clarke may have complained that he couldn't seem to get the president's personal attention before 9/11, but he sure got it after he publicly apologized to the weeping family members of 9/11 victims. His role eviscerated, at least temporarily, Bush's control of his defense of presidential privilege (which the White House never formally invoked). Card explained: "The dynamics -- the negotiations, if you will -- between the [time of the] creation of the commission and Richard Clarke's interview were far different than those that were dictated because of the hyperpublicity around Dick Clarke."

In March, to avoid testifying while still counterpunching, Rice had done everything but appear on the Home Shopping Network to defend the White House. Constitutional principle began to pale under the TV lights, so Bush instructed White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and other aides to steer the administration out of the mess. "We addressed many of the concerns the president had," Card said. "It was a compromise that we were not looking for. When you have executive privilege, you are not looking for an excuse to give it up."

There's a small irony in Bush's embrace of what Card called "the reality" of "the tug of immediate gratification": That's exactly what Bush found disquieting about the reactions of the investigation-plagued Clinton White House to congressional and independent-counsel demands for all manner of behind-the-scenes staff advice and communication to the president.

As far back as Bush's 2001 transition, "there was a recognition, and I think it was kind of a sad recognition, that the previous administration allowed for the erosion of some executive authority," Card said. "And I'm not casting aspersions on them, because the dynamics of the moment do have an impact."

Card said Bush was determined, as president, to undo the damages of the Clinton era and leave the presidency stronger for his efforts: "The president wanted to restore, not just accept ... the executive authority that presidents had traditionally been able to exercise."

Asserting Power, Whetting Appetites

Bush has had a notable run at flexing his executive muscles for more than three years. He took the nation to war in Afghanistan and Iraq and called up the military reserves under his authority as commander-in-chief. Bush controlled U.S. intelligence about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction and required the nation to trust his instincts about the virtues of toppling Iraq's government. He declared war on terrorism worldwide and said he had the sole authority to incarcerate U.S. citizens -- most prominently, Jose Padilla -- without charge or legal representation, if the government designated them as "enemy combatants" in that war.

Bush used the power of his pen to issue executive orders reconsidering some of his predecessor's safety and environmental regulations, and he is using the Office of Management and Budget to scrutinize (some critics assert OMB is manipulating) the scientific rationale for regulating business and industry. Bush also used executive orders to create new federal offices in response to the terrorist attacks of 2001, as well as a White House office devoted to helping faith-based and community organizations. And when the president couldn't get Congress to back his plan to make federal dollars flow to those religiously leaning organizations, he used an executive order to command the federal government to go as far as possible without new legislation.

When the Senate blocked confirmation of judicial nominees that Democrats found too conservative, Bush used his decree to temporarily fill two vacancies on the bench by taking the unusual step of recess-appointing judges who had been blocked. In another matter, the president said he would rather go to court than allow the General Accounting Office or Congress to compel the White House to surrender documents and other details of his energy task force, chaired by the vice president.

Bush has also seized on executive discretion to remove or withhold government information from the public -- with little accountability, as it happens -- on the basis of national security. And Bush has asserted by executive order that he, along with former presidents and their heirs or family members, should be able to invoke executive privilege to block the government's release of presidential papers under provisions of Watergate-era reform law.

Because of Bush's assertive use of his unilateral powers during his term, the constitutionally mandated checks on his authority have come knocking on the Oval Office door -- via Congress, the courts, and, in an election year, the voters. On April 27 and 28, the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in three cases that go to the heart of the executive's power under the Constitution: Cheney v. U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (the energy task force records dispute); Rumsfeld v. Padilla; and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (another enemy-combatant challenge). Bush can declare that Padilla can be held indefinitely in a military lockup because Padilla allegedly conspired with a terrorist group, but the Supreme Court will affirm or deny that power.

"The administration has been vigorous in reasserting the constitutional powers of the presidency," wrote John Yoo, a former deputy assistant attorney general under John Ashcroft in Justice's Office of Legal Counsel, in an e-mail response to a reporter's question. "This extends from the president's war powers, to claims of executive privilege, to efforts to preserve executive discretion in the operations of government.... Even should the administration lose these cases, it will still have several achievements to point to in the effort to restore presidential power, most notably in foreign affairs."

Yoo, who is now a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, offered examples such as Bush's decision to withdraw the United States from the International Criminal Court, and to terminate the Antiballistic Missile Treaty with Russia, without seeking congressional approval.

But if Bush is fond of invoking the long view on the issue of presidential prerogatives when it suits his purposes, he is hardly an absolutist, as the investigations into the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and their aftermath have made clear. Perhaps he will regret this course of action. Buying itself short-term tension relief, the White House opted to compromise with the commission by allowing Bush and Cheney to testify, permitting the commission to privately view classified documents of presidential briefings, and yielding on the issue of allowing the president's national security adviser to testify.

Although these actions restored some of Bush's political maneuvering room, both Gonzales and Card in interviews with National Journal expressed fear that what the White House really accomplished was to whet the appetites of the 9/11 commissioners and of Bush's political opponents. This concern may already have proved well founded. After the commission was granted access to the super-secret President's Daily Briefs prepared for Bush by the CIA, Democratic members of the 9/11 commission promptly exerted public pressure on administration witnesses to declassify the most provocative of those daily intelligence briefings -- the August 6, 2001, PDB titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."

That insistence proved fruitful: On Saturday, April 10, the White House capitulated on this presidential privilege, too, by declassifying the document and making it public. Less than a week later, Bush found himself in the East Room during a prime-time television news conference, taking questions about the document's warning that Al Qaeda wanted to hijack airplanes and having to answer why this warning hadn't prompted "specific actions on your part."

On granting the commission access to the PDBs, did Bush accommodate too much? Card said, "I think there are people who will try to claim that he has, and I will defend the president in making sure that it was for an entirely unique situation relating to a specific and horrible attack." The chief of staff, who earned his degree in engineering, emphasized more than once during an interview that he has long considered himself a serious student of the Constitution and sees defending Article II as part of his job. "I am kind of strident in that, and I'm comfortable being strident," he said.

Gonzales said in the interview in his office that as soon as the White House reached agreement with the commission on access to the PDBs, "we started hearing from certain members of Congress, and certain staffers, that, 'Gee, we're looking into this, and we ought to have the same ability to look at the Presidential Daily Briefs.' And that's why we are very concerned and take very seriously the notion of precedent," he said, "because once you do it one time, it makes it more difficult to say no in the future."

The Perpetual Dance

Both Card and Gonzales argue that the challenges to Bush's exercise of power are a reflection of the constitutional separation of powers, not a unique reaction to Bush's leadership. "Every president has had to go through this," said the chief of staff, who has served three presidents. "When I was in the Reagan White House, President Reagan went through it on Iran-Contra and depositions.... And then former President Bush had the same challenges."

The president's counsel, who was a Texas Supreme Court judge before Bush brought him to Washington, said history suggests there has always been a "dance" between the president and Congress about the limits of power. "It goes through cycles," said Gonzales, known inside the White House as "the judge." "In this particular point in time, we have a strong-willed president, we have an evenly divided Congress, we are in a time of war; and some would say those circumstances lead to, certainly, a perception of a shift to the executive branch."

"This is not a story about Bush," agrees William G. Howell, an assistant professor of government at Harvard University and author of the 2003 book Power Without Persuasion: The Politics of Direct Presidential Action. "More and more, we see presidents acting unilaterally, and that's absolutely true of Bush." The downside is that presidents may find it difficult to drive their legislative agendas through the gridlock of an increasingly decentralized and partisan Congress, Howell said, but the benefit to a president is that when the chief executive decides to seize the national agenda, Congress "has a hard time taking apart his unilateral action."

Bush has prospered by having a Republican majority of both houses of Congress, but even some loyal members of his own party find that the president and his aides hoard information when it's to their benefit, or they work to prevent disclosure by not sharing their intentions.

The increased eruptions of violence against the U.S. military in Iraq in the past few weeks invited another round of worries, mostly from Democrats in Congress, about Bush's plans for troop levels and international help on the ground. The frustration was as much about what they saw as a toothless Congress as it was about Bush's "we're-not-changing-a-thing" approach to the June 30 timetable for the turnover of governing authority to Iraqis.

"We need a plan. We don't have one yet," said Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, during one of many recent television interviews focusing on Iraq. He called for hearings to demand that the administration provide a plan, and answers. The administration, Biden complained in response to a question, hasn't consulted the committee about Iraq strategy. Why? "When you're in the minority, you don't have much control," Biden said.

In many ways, congressional Democrats are torn -- they're unhappy with Bush's penchant for what they consider secrecy, and they're somewhat relieved that they were cut out of Republicans' Iraq discussions. If creating a stable democracy in Iraq is not an achievable goal, Democrats want to distance themselves and their party from any unpopular outcome. It's too soon to write the history of Bush's attack on Iraq, but the president's "my-way" posture throughout his assault could hurt him if he comes to need the friends he previously shunned.

Angst Over Iraq

If a public consensus builds, either before or after Election Day, that Bush exceeded his authority only to achieve a failed or tragic outcome in Iraq, public outcry might compel Congress to adopt new checks on executive authority -- which would amount to the dramatic undoing of Bush's efforts to expand executive authority. This scenario is hypothetical, but the aftershocks from Vietnam and Watergate loom large as lessons.

John Samples, director of the Center for Representative Government at the libertarian Cato Institute, said that "one of the things that might come out of [Iraq] is the sense, the idea, that the president has enormous power to take us to war. And if [the decision to go to war] turns out to be wrong or a mistake, then it has to, in my view, usefully lead us to re-evaluate whether we want that much discretion in a president and whether we can figure out ways to constrain [future presidents] in an effective way."

Since Congress did vote to authorize Bush to go to war in defense of U.S. interests, the angst about Iraq might become a debate about the president's wisdom, rather than his executive powers, noted Paul Rosenzweig, senior legal research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation's Center for Legal & Judicial Studies. Looking at this year's political landscape, Rosenzweig said, "I don't see it right now as a referendum on presidential exercises of power domestically. I do see it as possibly becoming a referendum on the president's exercise of his foreign-policy powers -- national security and the war on Iraq."

Card discounts the suggestion that Bush's style of leadership and reliance on unilateral authority -- his penchant for swift action rather than long analysis, his impatience with recriminations, and his desire to control information by keeping it tightly held -- is undercutting public appreciation for that leadership. "I think the president is actually admired for his leadership and maybe not always respected for the policy that follows it," he conceded.

Card denies that Bush has public-perception problems with secrecy or with his credibility: "He is a very open person, and we've been a very open administration." It is safe to say that those two assertions are vigorously disputed, even among some Republicans around the country. "Open" is in the eye of the beholder.

As Democrats ask every day, where are those weapons of mass destruction that were the rationale for going to war with Iraq? Why did the Bush administration stifle its own larger-than-promised cost estimate of the Medicare prescription drug bill until after the bill passed by a hair in Congress? Why can't the public know which companies in industry conferred with the president's energy task force and what recommendations they made? Why won't the administration run out its tax-and-spending projections over 10 years, as the Clinton administration did, instead of the current five? Why did the White House tell the Environmental Protection Agency to water down descriptions in a report of health risks posed by debris in the air after the World Trade Center collapsed?

Trust and Truth

Two recent moves by OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs have watchdog groups crying foul. OIRA, the clearinghouse for reviewing all of the most significant and costly regulations that the government publishes, is pursuing a new approach to the quality of the science behind the nation's health and safety laws and regulations. Remember, this is a president who said during the campaign and again after he took office that in weighing truth against supposition about global warming, the science was not reliable.

OIRA favors a new "peer review" of the science, with assessments from scientific experts who are working in the arena being regulated. Privately, administration sources admit that OIRA's proposal, which has generated congressional and media scrutiny, is undergoing a major overhaul. The focus on uncovering "junk science" is the current expression of Republicans' traditional antipathy to regulation.

"If you just cast a frame around your regulation-reducing ideas not as reg relief, which won't sell, but as sound science, which will sell, you're going to make some serious progress that way," said University of Texas law school professor Thomas McGarity, who also heads the Center for Progressive Regulation. The center is critical of conservative Republican anti-regulatory policies. He says anti-regulation forces support OIRA's proposals because, "most important, the burden of proof is on the plaintiff.... Then the really 'good' part is that you can manipulate the science to make it come out your way. And one of the techniques is peer review."

OIRA Administrator John D. Graham, who spent 11 years as the founder and head of the Harvard Center on Risk Analysis and is on leave from the Harvard School of Public Health, has a special professional interest in evaluating the science behind government restrictions on businesses and employers. "Those who are advocating good regulations have nothing to fear from peer review," Graham insists, sticking to broad theory rather than discussing OIRA's draft description about how it would work in practice. "It allows for the voices of qualified, independent specialists to be heard amidst the strident rhetoric of stakeholders."

As evidence that OIRA is not immune to Bush's political ambitions in an election year, critics also point to the office's focus on the high costs of regulation on the manufacturing sector, where a job squeeze plays heavily in the news. Manufacturing gets special attention, and some sympathy, in OIRA's 2004 draft of its annual report on the costs and benefits of regulations.

Graham pretty much concedes the political value of the manufacturing argument this spring, when the focus is on creating jobs. "Now is an excellent time to pursue this agenda, since those who might oppose it face substantial political risk," he wrote in an e-mail (his preferred method of communication, he explained). "The economic case for streamlining costly regulations [on] U.S. manufacturers has never been more compelling."

Bush's record on regulation is going to be dissected by a broad coalition of public-interest groups in a report to be released in mid-May. "This kind of activity raises this issue about credibility within this administration," said Gary Bass, director of OMB Watch, which is part of the coalition. "You can't trust the information you're getting."

Trust and truth are at the center of the political debates about Bush's exercise of power as president. And they are an element of the legal debates as well. Long investigations, such as the 9/11 inquiry, invite intense scrutiny of the White House and have a history of exposing far more than presidents have desired -- not just in facts, but in judgment. The panel will release its official findings just as Democrats gather for their national political convention this July in Boston.

"It has been a tremendous drain on the administration," White House Counsel Gonzales said, in an effort to describe what the president's acquiescence has brought about. "We know the law requires the commission to do this investigation, and we are cooperating the best we can," he said. "But there has been a cost for that, and it has taken a lot of time, and the truth of the matter is, I'll be glad when it's over."

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Voices of Sept. 11: A special report

Alexis Simendinger and Carl M. Cannon — Fri, 30 Aug 2002 00:00:00 -0400

The Department of Defense became a target in broad daylight. The smoke plume was seen for miles, long into that sleepless night. When the 125 people who perished at the Pentagon are added to the 59 passengers and crew killed aboard American Airlines Flight 77, the carnage in Arlington surpasses Oklahoma City's bombing death toll of six years before.

The capital emptied. The president, traveling in Florida, went north, then west, then east. Commercial air traffic ceased. Telephone circuits jammed. Battle-attired military personnel brandished weapons of war on Washington's streets.

At the Pentagon, confusion, chaos, terror--and then, heroism--reigned. In a special report, National Journal asked some of the survivors--all of them accidental players in a tragedy of a generation--to share their versions of what happened.

"We felt this shuddering, and the whole building shook"
Lt. Cmdr. David Tarantino, U.S. Navy

"Everyone helps in some capacity. It's automatic."
Capt. David M. Thomas Jr. U.S. Navy

"It was fire, flame, smoke, everything"
Angela J. Williams, former civilian Defense security officer

"Sir, we could be next"
Gregory Fechner, former Air Force staff sergeant

"I think we're under attack"
Sgt. 1st Class Ed Bonilla, U.S. Army

"The thing I remember most was, I felt it"
Franklin "Chuck" Spinney, analyst, Office of the Secretary of Defense

"There was this overwhelming sense of helplessness"
Cmdr. Vincent McBeth, former administrative aide to the Navy secretary

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Turf wars, budget battles hamstring homeland security office

Alexis Simendinger — Fri, 03 May 2002 00:00:00 -0400

In its persistent, pugilistic efforts to re-educate Congress about the limits of legislative branch authority, the Bush White House has invited a small firestorm of retribution from lawmakers of both parties who are frustrated, for all sorts of reasons, with the White House and its Office of Homeland Security. The net result is that turf wars, lack of communication and consultation, poor preparation, and budget squabbles--all of the ills that the president's homeland security team is supposed to cure within the executive branch--may signal its own comeuppance.

Bush's current posture suggests that with or without Director Tom Ridge, the Office of Homeland Security is headed for a congressional makeover. This week, a bipartisan group of House and Senate lawmakers unveiled legislation that would put the entire debate about what critics describe as the toothless, unaccountable Ridge office into congressional hands and create a new Department of National Homeland Security, as well as a "national office for combating terrorism."

The department secretary would be confirmed by the Senate. Swept together under a new umbrella entity would be the Customs Service (removed from Treasury); the Federal Emergency Management Agency (independent, created by executive order in 1979); the Immigration and Naturalization Service's law enforcement and border management (out of Justice); the Coast Guard (out of Transportation); parts of the FBI (out of Justice); and the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (out of Agriculture).

The Brookings Institution also thinks that homeland security needs a legal floor. It released a 177-page study on April 30 that argued for a Cabinet-level homeland security agency within the Executive Office of the President, without creating a super-department. Brookings embraced an idea Ridge pushed quietly late last year, with little Cabinet-level or presidential support. The concept is a new border security agency, consisting of the Coast Guard, the Customs Service, and parts of the INS and the Agriculture Department.

This is not exactly what Bush envisioned in the heated days following 9/11, but these are changes he may get, largely because the West Wing's favorite theme song so often sounds like "My Way." Bush has shown an affinity for bypassing lawmakers. They have been asked to accept information offered, but not look to Ridge as an expert. Bush handed Ridge a difficult job, under challenging circumstances, with the worst command-and-control organizational structure imaginable, and then turned a deaf ear to suggestions that the White House was well-intentioned but misdirected.

"The Senate is rightly upset about the fact that the Bush administration is so stingy about giving out information," said Paul C. Light, Brookings' director of governmental studies. "I also think they are concerned about the continuing organizational problems that plague homeland security. It's basically a mistake-a-week right now in the executive branch, whether it's INS, or the FBI, or the CIA...I think Congress is aware that organization matters."

In fact, Congress believes that homeland security's organizational future, budget proposals, and policy recommendations must be linked. But Ridge ignored predictions that he would be hobbled by his title, then championed a definitive overall budget request--$38 billion for fiscal 2003--and simultaneously asked lawmakers to wait while his team assembled a set of comprehensive national homeland security recommendations for fiscal 2004 and beyond. That national strategy--10 or 12 chapters long--will not be ready until "late summer or early fall," said Gordon Johndroe, White House Homeland Security Office spokesman. Picture it: Democrats will be tearing into a new presidential strategy report just as Congress wraps up appropriations bills, just as the nation swoons toward the one-year anniversary of 9/11, and just before the make-or-break midterm elections.

The White House, with feet dragging, is playing just a bit of defense. Ridge, a presidential assistant, can brief Congress, after all: After the White House infuriated Congress in a time-wasting dispute over "briefings" versus "testimony," Ridge negotiated an open-Senate, open-press appearance to discuss border security on May 2.

The government may need to be reorganized, including Ridge's office: "At this time, it is premature to say what the final product will be, whether it is a Cabinet-level department, a statutory office or no change, but we are not ruling anything out and will carefully review all legislation," said Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer. The president's executive branch reorganizational proposals may, or may not, be in a full report: "That would be a chapter. That's the way it looks right now," Johndroe said, "and I would just caution that it could change. What if it's determined that maybe the organization shouldn't be a part of the national strategy--maybe that's a separate part because it isn't as tied into everything else? My point is, until it's a done, printed document, anything could change on it."

The president's $38 billion spending request, a number as yet divorced from any Bush policy proposals for 2004 and beyond, could increase, as some in Congress advocate: "We've worked very thoroughly with homeland security and vetted this number, and we think that right now this does represent pretty much all of the domestic homeland security/ combating terrorism measures and programs, but there is a possibility that once the review is done, there could be new programs or things identified that would be needed," Office of Management and Budget spokeswoman Amy Call said on May 1.

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Results-oriented President uses levers of power

Alexis Simendinger — Fri, 25 Jan 2002 00:00:00 -0500

Fast-forward: President Bush, it turns out, is not the least bit shy about embracing all the pomp of his office, and humility has occasionally given way to bravado. After September 11, Bush unblinkingly described his mission as "saving the world." Congress alone has the power to legislate, but the President in the past year has flexed all the muscles the Constitution gave him and, some would say, a few it didn't.

"I like my job a lot," Bush told a Louisiana audience on January 15, adding, "We've got a fantastic Constitution."

Despite Bush's rhetoric about the need to forge alliances with Congress to accomplish great things for America, and despite his call for patience, he has at times chafed at the glacial pace collaboration often requires. A President's ability to go it alone--by issuing executive orders, regulations, and instructions to agencies, and by asserting presidential privileges--has been a welcome relief for the business-school graduate whose public persona was built more on action than on deliberation. "I'm a performance-oriented person; I believe in results," Bush has explained more than once.

In his first year in office, the President used his various unilateral powers to set an example in leadership for Congress on his domestic policy ideals: He set up a new White House office to bring faith-based social programs and government closer together, and he initially tried to jettison Bill Clinton-era offices dedicated to AIDS and race issues. (AIDS stayed.) He instructed his department Secretaries to reappraise some pending regulatory requirements, begun under the Clinton administration, that were deemed philosophically at odds with Republican constituencies. Bush put the brakes on a rule setting the acceptable level of arsenic in drinking water--later, he let the rule go forward--and on a number of environmental regulations.

Bush used his authority over the federal bureaucracy to order that federal funding for research on embryonic stem-cell lines be limited to work on those lines that were in existence at the time of his decision. And he signed an executive order on his third day on the job overturning the Clinton administration's policy of giving federal aid to overseas family-planning groups that offer abortion counseling.

On foreign policy, Bush decided the United States would not ratify the Kyoto Protocol, a pact among 180 countries designed to reduce global warming (and one the Clinton administration had signed in 1997), and he informed a displeased Russia that the United States was withdrawing from the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty. As commander in chief, he waged war against a contagion of terrorism spreading in several countries, and after the fact welcomed a resolution of support from Congress in place of a declaration of war. As a defender of law and justice, Bush ordered up military tribunals for noncitizens, a forum in which he is essentially prosecutor and, in the end, judge and jury. He also blocked the U.S.-based financial assets of suspected terrorists and those of institutions believed to be offering the "evildoers" a helping hand.

Bush also set out to defend his prerogatives against the prying eyes of lawmakers, the media, and others. When the House Committee on Government Reform--chaired by Republican Dan Burton of Indiana, whose probes of the Clinton administration drove Democrats to distraction--requested Justice Department documents, Bush formally invoked executive privilege for the first time in his presidency. And he and Vice President Dick Cheney told the General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, that its demands for information on outside groups that met last year with the Administration's energy policy task force "would unconstitutionally interfere with the functioning of the executive branch." Bush has also used the war on terrorism and heightened concerns about security as justification both to seek and to lock up information.

Pulling Hard On The Presidential Levers

"The President, as the head of the executive branch and the commander in chief of our armed forces and the only political leader directly accountable to all Americans, has the unique personal responsibility to ensure the safety and security of our citizens," said White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales during a November 30 speech to a conference of the American Bar Association. "The Framers, in The Federalist Papers, spoke explicitly about the need for a unitary executive presidency, precisely to allow for bigger effectiveness and accountability in the conduct of our foreign and military affairs," explained Gonzales, a former Texas Supreme Court justice.

Most experts on the uses of executive authority divide their assessments of Bush's first-year performance into two phases: everything before 19 suicide hijackers of four jetliners murdered some 3,100 people, and everything after. Interviews revealed a consensus that Bush and his White House team have a feel for how and when to employ the presidential levers of power to their advantage.

Even before September 11, Bush was interested in exerting control from the West Wing. "This is often typical of Republican Presidents. They tend to be more sympathetic to centralizing power within the presidency. They see Congress as an undisciplined organization," said Kenneth R. Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) and the author of a recent book about executive orders and presidential power, With the Stroke of a Pen.

"There was an upswing in executive actions after September 11, because a President can do it fast," Mayer said. He cited the administration's early-October order to airlines to reinforce cockpit doors. Not until weeks later did Congress pass the legislative authority for that order, which was followed by the regulatory process specifying the airlines' compliance options. Counting executive orders alone, Bush signed more in the first three-and-a-half months after the terrorist attacks than he had in the eight months of his presidency preceding the tragedies.

To some conservatives, Bush--with his steady 80 percent or so job-approval rating--should be even more aggressive in his use of executive muscle, because of the challenges inevitably involved in juggling domestic and wartime priorities.

"I don't think that he's been as aggressive as he could be or should be," said Todd F. Gaziano, a senior fellow in legal studies and the director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation. "In the area of foreign policy, national defense, I think he is using his authority as aggressively as we would want him to, and appropriately. In the area of domestic policy, I think he has a conciliatory approach. He's always had, as part of his personality, a desire to reach bipartisan agreement, and maybe that's one reason he has not acted as aggressively as he should."

Gaziano--who was an attorney in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel under Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton--hopes Bush's bipartisan patience is "growing thin, with the recalcitrant positions that the Democrats are taking" under the leadership of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota.

Bush's White House aides insist that the President knows how valuable his political capital is, and that he has to spend that capital wisely. To presidency scholars such as Richard E. Neustadt, who wrote a seminal 1960 book on the subject, real presidential power is the strength and standing to persuade, in order to bring about government action. It is not just the authority to effect change by edict. "From the veto to appointments, from publicity to budgeting, and so down a long list, the White House now controls the most encompassing array of vantage points in the American political system," Neustadt wrote.

Bush's first year suggests he understood how to bargain when the policies at issue were most important to him personally--tax cuts and school accountability, for instance. Before September 11, however, the President seemed to get into the most trouble when he exercised power alone. The cumulative uproar over arsenic in water, his early regulatory actions that had an anti-green tinge, and the energy policies that favored the oil and gas industries were sour notes for Bush with the public and with many in Congress. The White House is still feeling the effects of those missteps as Bush heads into his second year.

After the September 11 attacks, when the President's popularity seemed to make him unassailable, Bush found that Congress's uncritical deference was short-lived. Even among Republican lawmakers, Bush's habit of acting first and asking later has set some teeth on edge.

"Congress is a coequal branch of government," pointed out a slightly exasperated Sen. John W. Warner of Virginia, the senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, in early October. Warner gently reminded the President that Congress--by design and by law--must be in the loop. Bush had briefly instructed the departments of State, Treasury, and Defense, along with the Attorney General and the directors of the FBI and the CIA, to limit intelligence briefings to only eight lawmakers. Bush's public tantrum, prompted when a Republican Senator publicly divulged information he had heard in a classified intelligence briefing, died quietly after GOP lawmakers rushed to the White House to remind the administration about the separation of powers between branches.

Rep. Burton has warned President Bush that he'll hold "hearing after hearing" as long as the Justice Department withholds documents that Burton's committee has subpoenaed on two closed cases: an internal memo to then-Attorney General Janet Reno recommending a special counsel to look into Clinton-Gore fundraising activities, and documents related to the FBI's handling of mob informants in Boston in the 1960s, after which a man spent 30 years in prison even though the FBI had evidence that he was innocent.

"These television cameras--you see one here today--there's going to be a whole raft of them in here before it's over with," Burton promised a Justice Department witness at a December 13 hearing. The session, complete with Burton's threats to take the Bush administration to court, was followed on January 23 by a second hearing that had been anticipated in opposing editorials published in The New York Times and The Weekly Standard magazine.

"While we appreciate what the President of the United States is doing in the war and as far as the economy is concerned, we believe that the Congress of the United States has a justifiable position and right to oversee the executive branch of government," Burton declared in December.

Moderate Republican Rep. Christopher Shays of Connecticut, a member of Burton's committee, is similarly disenchanted with the administration's unwillingness to cooperate with Congress's request for information on the case involving the FBI's mob informants. In his mind, if the President wants Congress to give the Justice Department more power in the wake of September 11, it must accept congressional scrutiny. "I think they know that Congress can be excessive, but welcome to democracy," Shays said in an interview. "The best antidote to abuse is to have things in the sunlight."

To find a compromise, the congressman said he wants to have a heart-to-heart talk with Attorney General John D. Ashcroft. "I expect I will have that opportunity, but if I don't, then I simply am not going to vote for the administration to be allowed to do things that I would like them to be able to do," Shays said.

Governing by edict is great for maintaining control, but it breeds secrecy and eliminates the kind of co-ownership of policies that can come in handy when criticism inevitably arises. After Richard Nixon's Watergate crisis and Reagan's Iran-Contra problems in the National Security Council, Congress and the public have been a bit skittish about centralized White House power. Now, after Clinton's messy web of lies and secrets, Bush's insistence on keeping all kinds of information confidential begins to raise suspicions.

"If they don't want to disclose, that tells me they have something to hide," Shays said when asked about the GAO's threat to sue the White House for information about the Cheney task force's meetings with outside interests.

Suspicion is "understandable," said presidency scholar Charles O. Jones, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin (Madison). Bush has not persuasively explained the administration's "better-government" desires to Congress and the public, so invoking executive privilege conjures up an unhappy slide show of past abuses. "My observation with the Bush administration is that in a number of cases where they wanted to make larger change, they have failed to do the educating part," Jones said. He cited the abandonment of the Kyoto Protocol, support for a missile defense shield, and backtracking on environmental standards.

Seeking A Bigger Change

Jones is right about Bush's desire to bring about larger change, which means getting Congress to pull back from the investigative climate that existed during the Clinton years, when Clinton invoked executive privilege and in the process invited court decisions that weakened the presidency. The White House said that Bush has had this goal in mind from the day he took office.

"The pendulum probably shifted too far toward the Congress, in terms of probing the administration, during the Clinton years.... I think there's been a healthy rebalancing so the executive can have the authority to get the job done," said White House press secretary Ari Fleischer. "Is it because we have something to hide? No. It's because it's the best way to have a healthy discussion inside an administration. And that serves the President."

Bush's mission is applauded by lawyer C. Boyden Gray, a former White House counsel to George H.W. Bush. Gray said that executive privilege "is used best as a bargaining tool" with Congress to find a compromise. "I do know that they were concerned, the people who worked on the campaign. [Deputy White House counsel] Tim Flanigan and others worried about some of the erosion during the Clinton years. I think they had a mind-set to try to shore up some of that," said Gray, who was a member of the Bush transition team.

Lloyd N. Cutler, a former White House counsel to Presidents Clinton and Jimmy Carter, said "Bush is doing the right thing" by trying to stave off Congress's interest in White House and agency documents relating to advice offered to the President during policy deliberations. "I think Presidents don't invoke executive privilege enough," Cutler said. "We're at the stage now where aides don't write memos because they are afraid of being subpoenaed." Cutler disagrees, however, that the Clinton White House invoked privilege too often, to the detriment of the presidency. "They should have done more," he said.

Clinton invoked executive privilege in the face of congressional requests for information 14 times. President Reagan did so three times, and the senior Bush asserted privilege once, in 1991. (Between 1792 and 1981, Presidents used executive privilege as a shield against congressional inquiries 64 times, according to the Congressional Research Service.)

Bush White House officials "may be trying to establish the principle of executive privilege and may believe they are upholding this executive power," said professor Mark J. Rozell, director of congressional studies at Catholic University of America in Washington. "But they are using some very nontraditional cases to do that," he said, referring to the now-closed Justice Department cases from which Burton is seeking documents. Rozell, who is the author of a book about executive privilege, said, "Right now, the administration is almost using executive privilege as an opening bid to engage in a battle with Congress."

Rozell suggested that in attempting to hold a firm line so as to repair the damage done to presidential privilege during the Clinton years, Bush's White House may be making the same bad bet--that it will prevail and strengthen the traditions of executive authority for all time. These days, that is hard to do.

If the White House wants to gain ground with Congress, the time to do it is early in the administration, said lawyer A.B. Culvahouse, who was counsel to President Reagan. Bush's use of executive authority overall has been "quite adroit," he said. "They probably have a couple decisions to... reconsider." Those decisions, he said when asked to be specific, involved the order on military tribunals that invited immediate reworking, and the privilege exercise over documents relating to Cheney's energy task force. White House officials "are on quite sound legal ground to decline to release it," Culvahouse said of the task force information. "But the political price may be too high."

Enron Corp.'s bankruptcy and the company's reach into the Bush administration may force the President to compromise with Congress on the energy task force's records, some observers predict. "It's always important to stand on principle," Fleischer said on January 18. "People here are realists also. If principle becomes so difficult to uphold that you have to re-examine it, that's always a potential. But I don't see that."

Aware that Enron was about to become a liability for Bush, the White House on January 3 wrote to Rep. Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif., the ranking minority member of Burton's committee, to give him part of what the committee and the GAO had requested. The Vice President, and task force staff, Cheney's office wrote, met with Enron representatives six times before the release of Bush's energy policy proposals. The GAO will decide by mid-February whether there is enough bipartisan congressional support to take the White House to court to obtain the rest of the information lawmakers seek, an office spokesman said.

"This administration decided to try to set a beachhead against oversight by Congress or anyone else, and thought that if they could win this fight, they'd be shielded from scrutiny," said Phil Schiliro, minority staff director for the House Government Reform Committee. "The administration, whether it's the Justice Department or the White House, seems to operate on the premise that [it is] not accountable to anyone. And they look at that as an absolute right for them," he continued. "And it simply is not how the system works."

Outside groups also are holding Bush accountable. Public Citizen has filed suit to challenge the President's controversial executive order tightening National Archives and Records Administration controls over the public release of presidential papers. The White House has said it is happy to defend itself in court.

In addition, organized labor is challenging executive orders Bush issued last February that were intended to help erase Clinton's favorable treatment of labor. In November, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia struck down Bush's order that barred union-only contracts, or project labor agreements, on federally funded construction projects. The Justice Department is appealing. On January 7, the District Court also blocked Bush's executive order (which reinstated an order of his father's that had been weakened by Clinton) requiring federal contractors to post notices informing workers of their right to avoid unionization and union dues. The order relates to a 1988 Supreme Court decision, Communications Workers of America v. Beck.

"The court's decision in the project labor agreement and Beck-posting executive order cases show that this President has clearly overreached his executive authority... in issuing executive orders that are not only anti-worker and anti-union but, now we know, illegal," said Lynn Rhinehart, associate general counsel for the AFL-CIO.

Presidential leadership--Bush's leadership--will be measured not just in the significant legislation he signs, or the international conflicts he wins, or the terrorist strikes against innocent Americans his administration thwarts, or the economic rescues he helps devise. His leadership will also be measured by his recognition of weakness--when bravado sets up false expectations, when secrecy erodes trust, when bypassing Congress undermines larger goals or exposes self-serving motives.

Lawyers, it is safe to say, can give Presidents questionable political advice. When Bush's counsel was asked in December during a CNN interview whether the President believed that seeking congressional authorization for some of his unilateral anti-terrorist actions might weaken his authority, Judge Gonzales gave an answer that could charitably be termed "legalistic," or perhaps "shortsighted." "We view the source of the President's power as the Constitution and not statute," he replied.

He never mentioned the voters.

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White House, Pentagon livid about leakers

Alexis Simendinger — Fri, 26 Oct 2001 00:00:00 -0400

The Washington Post and other media outlets jeopardized clandestine military operations, to the benefit of the enemy. "I think that the release by a person in the government who had access to classified information ... clearly was a violation of federal criminal law, and second, it was something that was totally in disregard for the lives of the people involved in that operation," the Defense Secretary said on October 22. "I couldn't care less where the source of the leak is; the responsibility is the same. It puts people's lives at risk, and it's just terrible." Rumsfeld admonished reporters: "How the press handles this new conflict will also contribute to the success of it." How the administration handles the truth about its new kind of war is surely the more important burden. Some old lessons still hold true. First, nonsanctioned disclosures of government information are a fact of life for all administrations; and, second, all Presidents hate leaks. Bush's desire to control information about his assault on terrorism is not novel. What is important is how far his administration decides to go to keep its confidences, believing it knows best about the public's right to know. John F. Kennedy in 1962 was so concerned with disclosures to The New York Times about Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles that he briefly weighed Clark Clifford's suggestion to establish a CIA unit to investigate journalists. Lyndon Johnson so despised leaks to the media that he once switched his choice of an appointee because The New York Times stole his surprise, and he discouraged memorandums from advisers on sensitive matters because he feared the memos would find their way into print. An obsession with information funneled to reporters was, of course, part of Richard Nixon's undoing. Ronald Reagan at one point considered imposing a blanket ban on all background and off-the-record interviews, and he approved an executive order requiring federal officials to get White House clearance before talking to the media about national security matters. George H.W. Bush believed leaking was the height of disloyalty, and he launched internal probes on more than one occasion to identify culprits in hopes of firing them. One such investigation, which involved copies of documents slightly altered to trace routes into journalists' hands, eventually revealed that Bush's own budget director, Richard Darman, was a leaker. He kept his job. Bill Clinton "was in a rage," former White House press secretary Jake Siewert recalls, when internal deliberations about ground troops in Bosnia made their way into the press. "He would tell [National Security Adviser] Sandy [Berger] to 'find out who this was, and stop them!' " Siewert said, "but it was always a fruitless task." When the pressure is on, there is always an instinct in any administration to tighten the circle of those close to important information while still appearing to the public to be forthright. The smaller circle satisfies the need for control, but does nothing about the appetite for candor, or the tendency in Washington for frustrated policy makers shut out of the circle to drop their advice on the President's desk via a newspaper. To hear White House officials tell it, the federal government has everything under control; the bureaucracy is coordinating smoothly and responding appropriately; the President has not lost sleep or changed his routine; and victory is certain. All of those assertions, without any partisan overlay, are suspect. If candor about what the United States doesn't know, about presidential worries and perceived risks, and about how and why decisions are made comes from anonymous truth-tellers rather than from government podiums, Americans should be relieved. And the administration should be forewarned. ]]>

Terrorist attacks put inexperienced President to the test

Alexis Simendinger and Carl M. Cannon — Fri, 21 Sep 2001 00:00:00 -0400

To address these worries, Bush put Vice President Dick Cheney in charge of a top-to-bottom review team and installed close Texas friend and longtime political aide Joe Allbaugh, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as the linchpin of a new Office of National Preparedness. The terrorism-review team, staffed primarily out of Cheney's office, was preparing its report when 19 suicidal hijackers commandeered four passenger jets on September 11 and propelled Bush, his team, and the nation headlong into crisis.

The President, who quickly expanded Cheney's review to encompass last week's events, had anticipated the potential risks. What he did not see was how soon, and in what form, terrorists would strike. He did not expect that "weapons of mass destruction" would mean 19 airline tickets and between 40,000 and 50,000 gallons of jet fuel, and no one thought catastrophe would present itself on Bush's 234th day in office.

"It is clear that the threat of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons' being used against the United States--while not immediate--is very real," the President warned on May 8 when he issued a simple written directive about planning for homeland defense. "That is why we must ensure that our nation is prepared to defend against the harm they can inflict." On the day he got his terrorism assignment, Cheney pinpointed the worry: "One of our biggest threats as a nation is no longer the conventional military attack against the United States but, rather, that it might come from other quarters. It could be domestic terrorism," he said.

But when the predicted horror arrived ahead of schedule, it literally lifted the Vice President off his feet: Secret Service agents picked him up and evacuated him to an underground White House bunker. For Bush himself, a man the Secret Service calls "Trailblazer," the disaster also had the predictable, but still surreal, effect of elevating him in the public's estimation to levels he never dreamed of attaining. Whether he remains there probably depends on how well he wages war against the shadowy "evil-doers" he keeps telling the American people about, and on how well the nation's law enforcement officers and military personnel protect the nation from further attacks. But if Bush himself was inexperienced, the team he assembled to lead his Administration was not. And in the first 10 days of the crisis, it was this experience, plus a fair bit of improvisation, that pulled Team Bush along.

Turning Weakness Into Strength

The 43rd President of the United States had served only six years in public office, all of them as a governor, and boasted no real experience dealing with international affairs when he came to Washington. George W. Bush did not have the extensive foreign-policy experience that Franklin D. Roosevelt had, did not have the experience of commanding men in battle that Dwight Eisenhower had, and did not have the long career in government that Richard Nixon or Gerald Ford had. Bush also did not possess the rhetorical gifts of Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton, or enjoy the advantage of working with a Congress of his own party, as did Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter. Bush also lacked the leverage that comes with being in office a long time or winning office by a large margin. His election was so divisive, in fact, that leading Democrats engaged daily in cheerfully undermining everything from Bush's legislative agenda to his very legitimacy. And when he was a young man, Bush was not tested in battle himself, as were Harry Truman, JFK-and Bush's own father.

Yet in the 10 days following the violent attacks that have engulfed his presidency, Bush has seemingly been able to turn these disadvantages into advantages that have enhanced his ability to lead a stricken nation.

The most obvious example, and one much remarked upon while Bush formed his government, was that precisely because of his own inexperience in Washington--and, really, in GOP politics--Bush had no hesitation in turning to people such as Cheney, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. All were seasoned old Washington hands who had served in previous Republican Administrations, including that of Bush's father. And those experienced officials have had a stabilizing and soothing influence.

"We want, as a country, to focus our attention and our energy and support for one person--our leader, our commander in chief, our President," said Republican Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge. "But in fact, if you've watched very carefully, this has been a team at work."

As the only MBA ever to sit in the Oval Office, Bush possesses the mentality of a successful CEO, meaning he has no difficulty delegating authority and does not see the success of his aides, even his No. 2 man, as threatening; rather, he sees them as complementing his authority.

"The President takes great pride in building a team," White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said in an interview. "I can tell you a story going back to the day he picked the Vice President.... [Bush] turned to me and said, `Just you watch. There will come a crisis one day, and Dick Cheney is exactly the type of man you want to have at your side when the crisis hits.' "

Traditional political operatives such as White House aides Karen P. Hughes and even Fleischer himself have gone to great pains to persuade reporters that Bush was in total command of everything. This week, Hughes was actually peddling a sheet of paper in Bush's handwriting as a way to show that the President himself wrote part of one of his speeches.

This misses the point. The strength of Bush's leadership in the minds of Washington political professionals--and probably much of the country as well--wasn't only visible in the natural way he related with the ironworkers atop a pile of rubble in New York who yelled "USA! USA!," nor was it solely apparent in the well-crafted speech he gave at a National Cathedral service. It was also in the no-nonsense presence of Cheney on NBC's Meet the Press, Powell's calm descriptions of his negotiations with foreign leaders around the globe, and Rumsfeld's steely briefings at the bombed-out Pentagon. Rumsfeld's immediate reaction on September 11 was to run out of his office to the site of the carnage, where he helped load Defense Department employees onto stretchers.

"The individuals are very strong and knowledgeable on their own, but they're also very good team members," Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta said of the top Bush team members. "Their maturity and experience has, I think, given a lot of confidence and stability to the whole operation."

Mineta's very presence in the Cabinet underscores another way in which Bush turned a weakness into strength. Having lost the popular vote to Al Gore by half a million votes, Bush was under some pressure to choose a Democrat for his Cabinet. He settled on Mineta, a holdover from Bill Clinton's Cabinet. It was a fortuitous choice.

Mineta is not only an aviation expert, but a longtime liberal and former California congressman with close ties to the Democratic congressional leadership. Moreover, Mineta is a living symbol of the spirit of ethnic tolerance that Bush invoked Monday when he went to a mosque and bluntly told Americans to treat Muslim Americans "with respect." When he was an 11-year-old Nisei boy in San Jose, Calif., Mineta and his family were rounded up and sent to the relocation camps set up for Japanese immigrants during World War II.

Bush told this story when he nominated Mineta as Transportation Secretary, and he returned to it again while meeting last week with congressional leaders. Mineta recalls that in that meeting, Rep. David E. Bonior, D-Mich., voiced concern about a backlash against Muslims and Arab-Americans, and he recounted Bush's response:

"David, you are absolutely right, because we don't want another situation like Norm Mineta was in, in World War II."

"So, he was very cognizant about that issue," Mineta told National Journal. "And I think that's the reason he went to the mosque, why he has continued to speak out on this issue."

There was another way in which bringing Mineta into his government showcased a Bush trait that has served the President well during this crisis. Bush has repeatedly said he wants to lower the volume and vitriol of partisan dialogue in this city. This determination turns out to be worth more than just style points. Much has been made in the days since the crisis about how Democrats and Republicans have set aside their differences and rallied around the nation and the President. But the fact that during his first eight months in office Bush eschewed personal attacks--even while some were directed at him--has made this easy for Democrats to do, both politically and personally.

In other words, the bipartisan airs weren't just for show; the cooperation has brought tangible results. At an Oval Office meeting with the four Senators who represent New York and Virginia, Bush was extraordinarily warm and solicitous toward the two Democrats from New York, Charles E. Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton. At that point, Congress and the Bush Administration had agreed on a $20 billion emergency appropriation to deal with the disaster, but in consultation with New York Gov. George Pataki and New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, it was clear that that amount wasn't even sufficient for New York. The Senators asked Bush for $40 billion.

"You need 20 extra billion for New York?" the President asked them.
"Yes," Schumer said.
"You've got it," Bush replied without hesitation.

So. Add two New York Democrats--and throw in Giuliani and Pataki--to Team Bush. This was quite a change for a state that went for Al Gore by 1.6 million votes. As Bush himself quipped in an aside after his visit to lower Manhattan: "I was surprised to see that New Yorkers could wave with all five fingers."

What Is He Asking For?

But if the nation was suddenly unified--and unified behind Bush--it was also clear that the President and his team realized they face the task of communicating with a multitude of audiences, each of which has a different concern. It was also clear that this President, who early in his term declined to appear before the cameras just for the sake of being seen, now understands how large a part of the job description communicating really is. And each day, Bush appeared in one or more of the roles a modern President must play: commander in chief, consoler in chief, steward of the economy, titular head of NATO, America's top elected official.

In his Friday visit to New York City, Bush was speaking primarily to the rescue workers and to the angry residents of the damaged city. When a man yelled, "I can't hear you," Bush responded: "I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you, too. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon."

In an Oval Office photo op with the president of Indonesia eight days after the attack, Bush was speaking to the Muslims of the world and the heads of state of their nations when he said: "I've made it clear, Madam President, that the war against terrorism is not a war against Muslims, nor is it a war against Arabs. It's a war against evil people who conduct crimes against innocent people."

In his visit to the Islamic Center mosque in Washington, Bush's goal was to reassure Arab-Americans and all those of the Muslim faith living in the United States, and to deter any trigger-happy rednecks who might mistake bigotry for patriotism. "America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens, and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country," Bush said. "In our anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect. Women who cover their heads in this country must feel comfortable going outside their homes. Moms who wear cover must be not intimidated in America. That's not the America I know. That's not the America I value."

In some of his communications, particularly those that were unrehearsed, it's not always been clear whom Bush had in mind. When he invoked the lingo of an old Texas lawman, saying he wants Osama bin Laden "dead or alive," he could have been appealing to the fighting spirit of the U.S. military, or perhaps sending a message to terrorists themselves.

But despite the varied messages for his different audiences, one central theme was still murky 10 days after the attack: It was not clear exactly what Bush was asking his fellow Americans to do. The suggestions Team Bush made in the aftermath of the slaughter included giving blood, flying flags, supporting charities, praying, going to work, and being patient. But there was an uneasy consensus in America that this will hardly be enough.

On Wednesday, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser in the Carter Administration, noted this gap, and called on Bush to address a joint session of Congress, to spell out in some detail what his Administration plans to do to fight terrorism. Within hours, Bush himself announced that he would do just that on the following day.

But all along, Team Bush warned that waging this war won't be easy. "We'll have to deal with the [terrorist] networks," said Rumsfeld in a Tuesday briefing. "One of the ways to do that is to drain the swamp they live in. And that means dealing not only with the terrorists, but those who harbor terrorists. This will take a long, sustained effort. It will require the support of the American people as well as our friends and allies around the world."

In some cases, members of Team Bush were given tasks to which they are particularly well-suited. Laura Bush was dispatched to the somber memorial service in Pennsylvania for those aboard United Airlines Flight 93. Mrs. Bush also flew to Chicago on Tuesday for a live appearance on Oprah Winfrey's syndicated talk show, to discuss how adults can console children during these trying days. Mrs. Bush, a former educator, also conveyed deep empathy for the nation's schoolteachers, who have struggled with how and how much to tell their students, especially the young ones. "We're asking them to console our children," Mrs. Bush said of the nation's teachers. "We need to pay attention to them-and console them."

As the days progressed, Team Bush appeared at times to encompass virtually every elected official, every prominent American in the land. Winfrey herself greeted Mrs. Bush on her show by holding both her hands while introducing her, in a poignant show of solidarity. Team Bush includes not just Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, and Mineta. It also includes Oprah and the Rev. Billy Graham and Spencer Abraham, Bush's Energy Secretary and an Arab-American.

Team Bush became Team Washington or, perhaps, Team America. Sometimes its pronouncements were calibrated to bolster other members of the team. Joe Allbaugh, FEMA head, used his time before the cameras to extol Mayor Giuliani's efforts to pull his city together. So did Sen. Clinton, Giuliani's one-time bitter enemy, who told America, "The mayor has been superb in every way."

Mrs. Clinton went to the victims' assistance shelter in lower Manhattan on Wednesday to personally thank the workers there. Then she volunteered that Pataki and Bush had been "great" in their responses. When Mrs. Clinton's husband arrived in New York City--he'd been in Australia until Bush dispatched a military jet to bring him home--he was besieged by New Yorkers wanting a hug and a kind word. Bill Clinton obliged, but when one woman asked him what he'd do if he were President, he quickly reminded her that "the important thing" for her to understand is that he's not the President and that all Americans must rally around the man who is.

Clinton was one of four ex-Presidents who--along with an almost-President, Al Gore--heeded Bush's call to attend last Friday's service at National Cathedral. One of them, former President George H.W. Bush, is a charter member of Team Bush, and after his son finished speaking and took his seat, Bush 41, without a word, and in fact without a glance, reached over and grabbed the hand of his eldest son. The President swallowed hard, in gratitude.

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