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November 15, 2004

The Cabinet hokey-pokey continued today with the news that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice would follow in Henry Kissinger's (and Colin Powell's) footsteps by moving from the White House security establishment over to Foggy Bottom. ABC News, among others, has the story.

Last week, as Washington Post's White House Briefing notes, the story was that the President and Chief of Staff Andy Card would try to space out these Cabinet resignations. But what we're seeing instead is almost a mass exodus. Evans, Ashcroft, Paige, Veneman, Abraham, and Powell have all left, and I wonder how much longer anyone else is going to stick around.

What's going to be the storyline for this? Here's how I suspect the rightists will try to frame the issue: Bush is cleaning house, making the Cabinet less and less fractious and more willing to carry out the White House's instructions. With his mandate, they'll say, Bush doesn't have to put in symbols of moderation like Powell. More importantly, Bush can dismiss secretaries like Paige and Ashcroft, who have been an interesting mixture of controversial and ineffective during their tenures, without admitting weakness or displeasure. In other words, you're not going to have any scenes like Dick Cheney telling Paul O'Neill in midterm to get out of the picture.

The left will say many of the same things, but given their disdain for Bush, they'll mean different things when they say it. But what I suspect will quickly become the dominant meme is that, first, Bush really is consolidating his power, and that the Porter Goss purges at CIA are a part of this. The replacement of Powell, with his independent stature, by Rice, who is a confidant of Bush with no independent power base, plays into this storyline pretty well. The second half of the left's attack is going to be that "the rats are fleeing the ship."

What's the truth? Well, truth doesn't play for either side here. The strategy that the White House was apparently contemplating--that the transition would be gradual, lasting perhaps a year--has completely failed: Two of the top four cabinet positions have been declared vacant in less than two weeks. Gonzales and Rice's appointments go along with the idea that Bush is taking all the independents out of his Cabinet. Yet Don Evans is a longtime Bush friend, and he's gone, too, just like Joe Allbaugh from FMA. More importantly, none of the five Cabinet members that have left have been particularly noteworthy for their successes; as Caleb McDaniel notes, Powell has disappointed those who had the highest hopes for him.

The real fun will come in the next two weeks, as the reshuffle continues. These are the times when I wish for a parliamentary system, so that we could get these reshuffles done all on one day....

Posted by Paul Musgrave at November 15, 2004 07:22 PM

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