Card loves reminding people that he is hired help -- that the "of staff" in his title is more important than the "chief," as if he were manning a drive-through window back at McDonald's.
"The president has every right to be selfish with my time," Card says. "That means there are sacrifices I need to make for the president to have what he needs. And those sacrifices usually impact my wife or my kids or my grandkids, or my siblings or my friends. And that is a burden I carry."
The burden wears heavily on chiefs of staff. It is "the ultimate burnout job," Duberstein says. In her memoir "Ten Minutes From Normal," Bush confidante Karen Hughes describes Card telling a prospective White House hire what he expects of his staff. "You don't get home until late at night, you work every weekend," Card said, according to Hughes. He said he didn't have a single day off in several years during the first Bush administration.
Card likes to point out that the average tenure of a White House job is 18 months. And that the chief of staff's job in particular is not suited for the long haul. Yet a few days after his reelection, Bush showed up at Card's morning senior staff meeting at to announce that Card would stay on.
"He's under severe stress and I worry about him," says Card's friend Natsios. "I'll call him at his office, at 6 [a.m.], when I know he's there, just to see how he's doing."
Card's name is periodically raised for Cabinet posts -- most recently, he was rumored to be the successor to John Snow as Treasury secretary. Card says he places such items "right on top of the garbage disposal." He shakes his head, asks, "What are you gonna do?" He rubs his eyes and says that it's been another long week.
He was in the office at 5:10 this morning. And he was out at a function at the Kennedy Center two nights earlier. He went to bed at 11:35, "then got a call at 3:50 a.m. from the Situation Room."
Don't bother asking: The rest of that cupboard is closed.
