Mouths Wide Shut

(According to Hormel's partner, Timothy Wu, Sen. Jesse Helms [R-N.C.] sent Secretary of State Madeleine Albright a letter to make sure that Wu would have no official role in embassy functions or have any of his expenses paid with U.S. tax dollars.)

For all the trials and tribulations, Hormel did get the job. John Tower, Lani Guinier and so many others didn't.

Republican Linda Chavez went through the process twice, once in a bitter fight as a 1983 Ronald Reagan nominee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. She, too, ended up being a recess appointment.

The Democrat-turned-Republican faced serious opposition the second time too, when George W. Bush nominated her to be his secretary of labor. "It's hard . . . to rely on others to be able to tell your story for you," she says. "You know that every line you've ever written, every statement you've ever made in public, is going to be fodder."

When Bush offered her the Cabinet post, she says, "one of the things he talked about was how it was going to be tempting to shoot back, and he basically suggested that I not do it. That I try to hold my fire."

She didn't have to hold it for long. Chavez withdrew after a week, when it was reported that she had given shelter to an undocumented worker. It had shades of Zoe Baird's "Nannygate" uproar in the Clinton years. "I remember in my week-long nomination there were things taken very much out of context," she says, to which she could not respond.

Is it naive to wonder why capable, smart people who've built careers speaking for themselves can't continue doing that -- especially when they're at such a critical moment in their careers?

"It sure as hell would be refreshing," Leon Panetta says from his offices at the Panetta Institute, a nonpartisan public policy program at California State University, Monterey Bay.

"It would be, obviously, a lot more honest. The problem is I'm not sure how you get back to that kind of world."

A former Clinton chief of staff, Panetta knows what a confirmation fight can look like from the inside. "There clearly was a time when people could be a lot more honest, not only with the questions but the responses," he says. "The problem is that now the process has become just another element in the continual trench warfare that's been going on in Washington."

In war, the object is to win.

"The fundamental goal of the nomination process is to ensure that the nominee" avoids providing "the opponents with any substance that they'd be able to use to bring them down," he says.