Bush Government Shakeup! Film at 11!

"There is also a consensus emerging in Republican and diplomatic circles," the New York Times reported last Friday, "that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell will stay on into 2005 because of the international crises coming to a head."

"People close to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell," the Los Angeles Times reported last Wednesday, "have left open the possibility that he too might remain at his post, at least for several more months."

We are deep into the silly season of second-term speculation. Everyone said during the campaign that Powell would resign if Bush won, then lots of people said after Nov. 2 that he'd stay on for awhile, and yesterday the secretary of state resigned. Journalists were gearing up for lots of useless crystal-ball-gazing about who was the "leading contender" or "emerging" to replace Powell--until word leaked that the president plans to name Condi Rice (who presumably will give him less flak than Colin).

For the incorrigibly hard core, there's still time to speculate about who will replace Rod Paige, Spence Abraham and Ann Veneman, who also made their departures official yesterday. America is anxiously awaiting!

It was mildly amusing to watch the cable networks shift into breathless "breaking news" mode over the Powell resignation, as if Cabinet members don't routinely move on after a president's reelection. But in the post-election void, anything can be major news.

Colin Powell has long been the object of media fascination, going back to the Gulf War and his Joint Chiefs role. Part of the punditocracy wanted him to run for president in '96, and there's no doubt he would have been a formidable candidate had he decided to take the plunge.

Powell has generally cultivated good relations with reporters, and in some ways he was the most fascinating subplot of the first Bush term. Was the multilateralist increasingly frustrated working for a unilateralist president? How was he faring in the bureaucratic power struggle against Don Rumsfeld? Why couldn't he get Bush to more strongly engage in the Middle East? How strongly did he argue against the Iraq war? (Powell gets so much press that his "Pottery Barn rule" warning to the president--"You break it, you own it"--became famous even though the retail chain says it has no such policy.)

This is clearly a good time for journalistic reflections on Powell's career. The dominant theme this morning: Powell is a charter member of the Society of Moderation, and the press really, really likes moderation types in Bush World.

Let's look at how the shuffle is playing, beginning with the Los Angeles Times:

"A former four-star general, hero of the Persian Gulf War and the first African American secretary of State, the 67-year-old Powell leaves office as he came: deeply respected and the most popular man in the Bush administration. Yet many analysts consider Powell -- a man who reaped success throughout his life -- a disappointment in a job that once seemed perfect for him...

"Democrats and moderate Republicans loved what they believed Powell stood for, viewing him as a leading voice of moderation in an administration known for hawkish positions. But some fault him for failing to halt what they saw as a rush to war in Iraq, for making the administration's case for war before the United Nations and for failing to resign when he lost major foreign policy battles."

The New York Times: "Mr. Powell, who had deep misgivings about the war in Iraq but acquiesced to the president's wishes and made the administration's case for the invasion before the United Nations, was described by friends as worn down and tired of his battles with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. . . .

"People close to Ms. Rice said on Monday that she had been interested in succeeding Mr. Rumsfeld as secretary of defense or returning to academia at Stanford University, where she was provost. But they said she would serve as secretary of state if the president asked, which would make her the first black woman to take a job first held by Thomas Jefferson. There were no indications that Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation was imminent, and Republicans continued to say that he would like to stay in his job for the immediate future, if only to get beyond his handling of the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, a scandal that infuriated Mr. Bush.

"Senate Democrats said on Monday that Ms. Rice would ultimately be confirmed, but not without a thorough examination of her record on Iraq. They said it was her job to make sure that the president was presented with the best possible information before the invasion. On that score, there were clear failures on her watch, they said, and also with postwar planning."

The Boston Globe: "The impending departure of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, with the mutual consent of President Bush, signals the final fadeout of the leading moderate voice on the Bush administration's foreign policy team."

The Philadelphia Inquirer: "Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's resignation and a flood of high-level departures at the State Department and CIA remove the cautionary voices that often acted as a brake on President Bush's aggressive foreign policy.

"U.S. officials and foreign-policy analysts said yesterday that by agreeing to Powell's departure and approving a purge by new CIA chief Porter J. Goss, Bush and Vice President Cheney appear to be eliminating the few independent centers of power in the national-security apparatus and cementing the system under their personal control."

The Wall Street Journal: "The decision to elevate Ms. Rice came just hours after Mr. Powell, an often-frustrated advocate for diplomacy rather than confrontation in international affairs, formally announced his resignation yesterday. . . .

"Unlike Mr. Powell, Ms. Rice is extremely close to the president, and regularly spends weekends at Camp David with Mr. Bush and his wife. She has often expressed impatience with traditional diplomacy and slow-moving diplomats, and her appointment could be seen as an effort to whip the department closer to the president's hard line. . . .

"But the department and its cadre of professional diplomats also could reshape Ms. Rice. She was seen as a moderate more in the mold of the first President Bush, when she was named national-security adviser four years ago, but has since become a strong voice for an assertive and at times unilateralist U.S. foreign policy.

"Ms. Rice also has sparred with Mr. Rumsfeld, especially over the foundering management of Iraq's reconstruction. Some critics have said she should have done more as national-security adviser to ensure that the effort was on track from the start. She could face some tough questioning in Senate confirmation hearings about the failure of U.S. intelligence before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, as well as claims that Iraq was hiding large caches of weapons of mass destruction -- which haven't been found."

The New York Post says Powell got a push:

"Powell, whose resignation was announced yesterday, had wanted to leave only after sticking around for several more months, until the spring, to kick off expected Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in the wake of Yasser Arafat's death, an administration official said.

"But Powell was rebuffed by Bush, the official said.

"Powell denied he had try to cut a departure deal."

But the New York Daily News says he was miserable:

"Bush administration officials who figured Colin Powell might soldier on awhile obviously weren't aware of a retirement party the secretary of state attended several months ago.

"'This has been the worst time in my life,' Powell confided to a Pentagon general during the otherwise festive occasion.

"It was a breathtaking admission from a man who gave his nation nearly 40 years as a soldier, statesman and racial trailblazer - and a damning commentary on his frustration with the intramural ideological warfare of the Bush administration."

Andrew Sullivan isn't impressed--except in one respect:

"It's hard to know what her actual foreign policy instincts will be once she comes out from under the pincer movement of Powell, Rumsfeld and Cheney. Will her Scowcroftian background re-emerge? I doubt it. If Rumsfeld leaves, we might get a better idea. But my guess is that he won't. Now that Powell has gone, Rummy will see it as a matter of cojones that he stay for a while, if only to prevent sufficient manpower being deployed to win the war in Iraq, and to let memories of Abu Ghraib fade. (Sorry, Rummy, but mine won't.) So: no change with the appearance of real change. In fact, the likelihood of any new tack in foreign affairs just collapsed.

"But the real genius of the Rice appointment is domestic. She will become the second most powerful African-American woman in America. And she will become that as a Republican icon. That has to have an impact on the way at least a small minority of black voters will view Bush (and not a few other minority voters)."

More piling on Kerry, this time from Kenneth Baer in American Prospect:

"Too much credit is being given to President George W. Bush, and not enough blame is being placed at the foot of John Kerry. The time for biting our tongues is over, so let's just say it: Kerry was a bad candidate. He was dealt an amazing hand -- a president who was elected without the popular vote, who oversaw the first net loss of jobs in 72 years, and who led the nation into a war under false pretenses -- and he blew it.

"Part of the reason is that Kerry suffered from a horrendous case of senatoritis: pontificating instead of speaking, orating instead of communicating, and offering programs instead of a vision. His years in Washington also added to the sense that Kerry was part of a cultural elite that didn't understand the concerns of middle America. (His snowboarding, windsurfing, and Hermes ties didn't help, either.)

"To that, Kerry apparently was unable to run his own campaign. As Newsweek details in its behind-the-scenes look at of the presidential race, Kerry wanted to hit back quickly against the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads, but was overruled by his staff. He wanted to fire one of his top aides; again, he was overruled. Kerry went through three senior management teams, and effectively replaced one of them eight weeks before Election Day. There is always chaos in political campaigns -- believe me, I worked on the Gore campaign -- and many rightly want to blame the pollsters and consultants brought in to guide the Democratic effort. But ultimately, everything in politics reflects the principal, and the buck stops with the candidate."

Josh Marshall has a new target--those Democratic consultants who seem to populate every presidential campaign:

"It's just time for some of these folks to go -- not because they're bad people (though more than a few are opportunists and backstabbers) or they lack expertise but because the party needs some new blood. The lessons of the 70s and 80s or even the 90s are not directly relevant to today.

"If you've lived in Washington for any length of time you know it's laughable to imagine that the Republican operators are any less well-heeled or disconnected from lives of most Americans than their Democratic peers...But the Democrats do have an aristocracy of operatives --- and the 'a' word is appropriate on a number of levels. Some have been around for decades, a few of the best came up with Clinton in 1992, and others came in during the '90s when the getting was good and mistook the power of incumbency for their own skill.

"More than anyone or anything else they are the Democratic party. With organized labor as diminished as it is and party organizations at every level less institutions than conduits for political money, these folks are the power-brokers, the institutional memory, most of everything that persists over time, cycle after cycle, long after the race horses (i.e., the candidates) are put out to pasture.

"So for all these reasons there is something rich and precious about hearing some of these folks sagely noting how the leadership of 'the party' is out of touch with the Red States when they are the party, when they're the folks who've been in the drivers' seat for years. If there's a problem and especially if it revolves around being out of touch with the lives of ordinary Americans, then by all means the first place to start is for some of these folks to say a collective, my bad, my time has passed and depart the scene --- especially if their proposed remedies are as clichéd and pathetic as the ones many of them are offering."

The problem for Democrats is not that they don't cite scripture enough or that they don't live

Too bad Josh doesn't name any names.

National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru doesn't want to exile Arlen Specter, just deny him the Judiciary chairmanship:

"Would passing over Specter amount to a 'purge' of pro-choice Republicans? We should avoid overstatement here. Nobody is saying that Specter should be sent to Siberia, censured by the Senate, kicked out of the Republican party, or even removed from the Judiciary Committee. The anti-Specter forces are happy to see Specter get another committee chairmanship. They have said only that it would be unwise to put him in charge of one particular committee.

"If keeping Specter from the judiciary chairmanship would be a purge, it wouldn't be a purge of pro-choicers. Nobody is saying that Specter should be removed because he supports legal abortion and cloning. Nobody is even saying that he should be removed because he doesn't want to let states that disagree with him on abortion ban it. Specter, however, has suggested that he might not even countenance the possibility that judges who recognize the unconstitutionality of Roe could get on the bench. Pro-lifers think that maybe someone with those views should not be running the Judiciary Committee. Other conservatives worry about placing someone with Specter's views on originalism, tort reform, and racial preferences in that position."

Eliot Spitzer, the New York attorney general who's taken on the stockbroker and insurance industries, has gotten a clear path to run for governor next year:

"Sen. Charles Schumer said yesterday that he would accept a Democratic leadership position and a seat on the powerful Finance committee, forgoing a run for governor in 2006," Newsday reports.

"Schumer, who aides and political insiders say had been mulling a bid for the post, opted to stay in the Senate, where for the next four years he will serve as chairman of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, overseeing the Democrats' effort to regain control in elections in two years."

Well, it must be sweeps week. A Cleveland station is promoting a story in which anchor Sharon Reed, well, takes off her clothes. "Why would people bare it all for a stranger?" she asks in a promo. Journalism in its rawest form, I guess. Parental guidance suggested.