After Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois today agreed to become Barack Obama's White House chief of staff, praise came from an unexpected quarter.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who was at John McCain's side almost every day of the 2008 general election campaign, negotiated the details of the presidential debates with Emanuel, representing Obama.
This is a wise choice by President-elect Obama. Rahm knows Capitol Hill and has great political skills. He can be a tough partisan but also understands the need to work together....
I worked closely with him during the presidential debate negotiations, which were completed in record time. When we hit a rough spot, he always looked for a path forward. I consider Rahm to be a friend and colleague. He's tough but fair. Honest, direct, and candid. These qualities will serve President-elect Obama well.
Toughness is the quality cited most often by presidential scholars -- and several former occupants of the position -- in describing what matters in a White House chief of staff.
Dick Cheney, chief of staff to President Gerald Ford, has developed something of a reputation for toughness himself as vice president to George W. Bush.
But Cheney told political scientist Martha Kumar in 2001 that organization was the key to being White House chief of staff. In an interview for the Presidency Research Group, for which Kumar spoke to 80 former White House staffers, Cheney said:
His reach, his ability to sort of guide and direct the government, to interact with the Cabinet, to deal effectively with the Congress, to manage his relationship with the press, all of those are key ingredients to his success.
With less than three months left in the Bush administration, the battle over protecting two vast areas of the Pacific Ocean from fishing and mineral exploitation is raging as if the president's legacy depended on it.
Which, actually, it does.
On one side is first lady Laura Bush, who according to the Washington Post has asked for two briefings on the issue from the White House staff, and has asked her aides to confer with scientists on how to preserve diverse ecosystems.
On the other side is Vice President Dick Cheney, who along with some officials in the Northern Mariana Islands argues that banning fishing and mineral exploration will hurt the region's economy.
"It's hard, but it should be," said James L. Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. "These are big, consequential, national decisions that have international ramifications."
In August, President Bush told several federal agencies to begin working on a plan so that he could create two "marine conservation management areas" in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth between Japan and Guam. That move -- if it happens -- would greatly expand Bush's environmental legacy, adding vast territory to the 140,000 miles he designated for protection in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands in 2006.
It would also protect blue sharks like the one above from shark finning, the practice of removing the dorsal fin from sharks for such Asian delicacies as shark fin soup. According to the National Marine Fisheries Service, hundreds of thousands of finned sharks are incidentally caught by fishermen chasing swordfish and tuna in the waters off Hawaii, Guam, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands.
-- Johanna Neuman
Photo: National Marine Fisheries Service / Associated Press
With an open that notes Obama's recent endorsements from former Secretary of State Colin Powell and fabled investor Warren Buffet, the ad then cuts to Cheney at a campaign event Saturday in Wyoming, his home state, one of the dwindling number in the safely Republican column. In the footage, Cheney says:
I'm delighted to support John McCain. I'm pleased that he's chosen a running mate with executive talent, toughness and common sense, our next vice president Sarah Palin.
It's kind of unusual for a presidential campaign to target the other side for having the support of its team. But Cheney and President Bush both are down in public opinion polls so the Obama campaign elected to use the footage to underscore its theme that McCain's policies would result in a third Bush term.
Noting McCain's support for the White House "90% of the time," the ad concludes, "That's not the change we need."
No, this is not some Halloween stunt. That guy you see over there being held accountable is actually the vice president of the United States.
The U.S. District Court in D.C. ruled today that Vice President Dick Cheney will have to let his deputy chief of staff, Claire O'Donnell, give testimony in a lawsuit over his records.
Cheney, with his well-known passion for secrecy, had argued that a vice president need only preserve records central to his job as the official who presides over the U.S. Senate or records relating to specific tasks assigned by the president. That would narrow the pile considerably.
A group of historians and others at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) have filed a lawsuit, concerned about their eventual access to the vice president's records. In a second round victory, the court today denied Cheney's move to block discovery in the case.
Anne Weismann, CREW's chief counsel, hailed the decision.
Today's decision, allowing CREW discovery in our case against the office of the vice president, moves us one step closer to ensuring that important historical documents will not be lost to future generations. CREW looks forward to deposing Cheney’s Deputy Chief of Staff Claire O’Donnell to get to the bottom of what exactly the administration has been doing with documents that belong not to the vice president, but to the American people.
The vice president's office declined to comment, noting that the case was still in court. Where Cheney may well file an appeal.
Democrat Barack Obama sharpened his criticism of rival John McCain today, comparing him to George W. Bush nearly two dozen times during a half-hour rally at Peccole Stadium at the University of Nevada's Reno campus.
Noting that McCain is trying to distance himself from the president, Obama said: “Well, let’s be clear: John McCain attacking George Bush for his out-of-hand economic policy is like Dick Cheney attacking George Bush for his go-it-alone foreign policy. … It’s like Tonto getting mad at the Lone Ranger.”
-- Seema Mehta (in Reno, Nev.) and Johanna Neuman (in Washington, D.C.)
Photo: Reuters. Actor Clayton Moore as "The Lone Ranger" in the popular 1950s television series shown in a publicity photo with his co-star, Jay Silverheels, who portrayed "Tonto."
Vice President Dick Cheney says it regularly: He rarely votes in the Senate, but when he does, the Bush side always wins.
That's because the vice president, as president of the Senate, only votes to break a tie.
Along comes Sarah Palin, ready to mix it up as the McCain administration's team leader in the Senate.
Responding to a third-grader's question about what the vice president does, she said:
A vice president has a really great job because not only are they there to support the president's agenda, they're like the team member, the teammate to that president. But also, they're in charge of the United States Senate, so if they want to, they can really get in there with the senators and make a lot of good policy changes that will make life better for Brandon and his family and his classroom. And it's a great job, and I look forward to having that job.
Well, as Cheney has pointed out, not quite.
It is pretty clear in the Constitution, Article I, Section 3:
The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.
Palin's confusion led CBS News' Horserace blog to ask: "Would Palin Be 'In Charge' Of The Senate?"
Maria Comella, the Republican vice presidential candidate's spokeswoman, explained it all this way: "She was explaining in terms a third-grader could understand that the vice president is also president of the U.S. Senate."
In any case, Palin's mistake -- or, to use Comella's explanation, simplification -- is not uncommon.
As the Senate's own website notes, the job of vice president is "the least understood, most ridiculed, and most often ignored constitutional office in the federal government."
It's the soundbite heard 'round the (political) world. Democrat Joe Biden suggested that his young running mate Barack Obama would be tested by international foes within the first six months of his administration, much as a young John Kennedy was tested by the Soviets in the Cuban missile crisis.
Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. ..We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we are going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.
Biden, who has a reputation for shooting off his mouth, didn't stop there.
He's gonna need you -- not financially to help him -- we're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right.
Republicans were quick to exploit the gaffe. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, colleague and traveling sidekick to John McCain, thanked Biden at a rally in Bensalem, Pa., this morning. "Thank you for reminding us the way the world is," he said, and for reminding voters that "there's never been a candidate for president of the United States more tested than John McCain." Even the first-term governor of Alaska Sarah Palin weighed in, saying the White House is no place for "on-the-job training."
All of this suggests that Biden would be a far different vice president than Dick Cheney. In some sense, Biden is the anti-Cheney -- all talk, no stealth.
Cheney, known in some quarters as Darth Vader, specialized in influence from within. Using a team of legal talents, he steered President Bush to approve domestic wiretapping, keep documents and witnesses out of congressional hearings and authorize torture techniques for terrorist suspects.
Will Biden, like Cheney, keep his counsel to the president confidential? Or will his verbal excesses sour President Obama on even listening to him?
Obama might take a few pointers from Bush, who told Cheney not to talk so much in meetings where both of them were in attendance. Or at least that's what Oliver Stone says in his new movie "W."
Cheney has been the West Wing equivalent of a black hole, emitting nothing. Joe Biden emits, emotes, speculates, hypothecates. If he's the next vice president, we're in for some fun.
Chalk it up as one last big win for Vice President Dick Cheney and his secretive -- OK, that's redundent when talking about a Cheney guy -- chief of staff, David Addington.
Remember when the president said in August 2007, "it should be a goal of the nation to shut down Guantanamo?" (Of course, he added, closing it is easier said than done.)
Never mind -- at least for now or anytime in the near future.
The State Department reportedly prepared memos on transferring the prisoners; so did the Pentagon. Bush considered none of them.
That's according to a report in today's New York Times, which said that after the Supreme Court ruling, Bush "adopted the view of his most hawkish advisors that closing Guantanamo would involve too many legal and political risks to be acceptable, now or any time soon."
Steven Lee Myers, writing in The Times, says that despite the president's stated desire to close Gitmo, and the pressure that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have applied to accomplishing that, they have "acquiesced to the arguments of more hawkish advisors, including Vice President Dick Cheney."
White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said of the Guantanamo decision: "It's very complex. It's complicated. It's difficult."
She said the admininistration was working to reduce the population at the prison -- and had brought it down from about 600 to 270.
"It's not as easy as snapping your fingers" and closing the prison, she said, adding, "unless you don't care."
That was a reference to the 7% of released detainees who, she said, have returned to the battlefield.
"It's slow work," Perino said at the daily White House news briefing this morning. "The president has made a decision to close Guantanamo Bay. That has not changed."
As for Cheney, his spokeswoman, Megan Mitchell, said by e-mail seconds after Perino spoke: "You heard from Dana in the briefing. I don't have anything to add beyond that."
Colin L. Powell, the former mud soldier, hurled his political grenade in defense of Barack Obama, but the collateral damage hit the Bush White House.
To be sure, he was opting for Obama, but the undercurrent of his message was a strong rejection of the direction the Republican Party -- and the nation -- have taken under President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. We won't even get into his quiet dis of Sarah Palin.
And 24 hours after President Bush's former secretary of State said he would vote for the Democratic presidential nominee, he has been given a cold shoulder, so to speak, from the Bushies.
"He's not heard anything from the White House types," said a close friend who spoke with Powell before and after his appearance on "Meet the Press" on Sunday.
On the other hand, he's heard from just about everyone else, this Powell friend said, and response has been "overwhelmingly positive."
The friend added:
He feels very good about what he said yesterday. He's very comfortable with it.
The White House non-reaction, so far, is not too surprising when you consider what Powell was saying in this mildly worded but devastating sentence from Sunday's TV performance: "I have some concerns about the direction that the party has taken in recent years."
Or the rejection of the impact of the recent Bush years when he said that the next president would have to "fix the reputation that we've left with the rest of the world."
And when did the U.S. standing turn sour? As Countdown to Crawford reported Saturday, the polls abroad are pretty striking in the rejection of U.S. policy under Bush.
Come to think of it, considering the efforts of the White House team to maneuver around Powell when he was in office, their response to the distance he is putting between himself and the president may not be that strange. The picture of Bush, Powell and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in 2002 notwithstanding, they really weren't that, well, close.
Characteristically, Powell on Sunday used very forceful, deliberate -- but polite and toned-down -- language, choosing a course that would leave little room for anyone to pick it apart and suggest he was in any way hedging his bets.
But we know, from personal experience, that although adept at using nuanced language, he can make his point strongly, with no room for doubt, when he so chooses.
The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Bush 41 and Bill Clinton has been a friend of John McCain for a quarter-century, but he decided that friendship could not be the determining factor.
Rather, he wanted to nudge the Republican Party away from its current course -- one that he sees as having turned rightward particularly during the second Bush-Cheney term, which of course would be the period when he had already left the administration.
But in the end, the Powell friend, bursting out in a broad chuckle as he played off McCain's campaign theme of "Country First," said of Powell's decision: "He put America first."
There's a healthy Internet buzz today on a Washington Post story saying the CIA endorsed such harsh interrogation techniques as waterboarding against Al Qaeda suspects in 2003 and 2004 -- and eventually got a written endorsement from Bush administration higher-ups.
What we find interesting about the story is the prospect that as the Bush administration fades, there remains the likelihood that its wall of secrecy will slowly turn into shards. The result: The pieces will continue to reveal details of how President Bush conducted the campaign against terrorism.
As for the latest shard:
The Post reported that then-CIA Director George J. Tenet requested the memos "more than a year after the start of the secret interrogations," to create a paper trail leading to the White House.
The paper reported:
The repeated requests for a paper trail reflected growing worries within the CIA that the administration might later distance itself from key decisions about the handling of captured Al Qaeda leaders, former intelligence officials said.
And those concerns only grew after the revelations of prisoner abuse that occurred at Abu Ghraib in Iraq.
James Gerstenzang and Johanna Neuman are reporters in The Times' Washington bureau. Between the two of them, they have covered the White House, diplomacy, military affairs, the environment, international economics, trade and Congress. They have both spent time in Crawford, Texas.
