The Card Sacrifice

" 'I serve at the pleasure of the president for the time being,' Card said during a recent interview in his spacious office, just down the hall from the Oval one. 'If the pleasure goes, I go. If the time being arrives, I'm gone. And I don't expect a month's notice or two weeks' notice.' "

Mark Leibovich wrote about the "aggressively lowfalutin" Card's amazing memory techniques in The Washington Post last year.

Here's my own brief bio of Card.

Card may be best known by the public for his role on Sept. 11, 2001, informing Bush that a second hijacked plane had struck the World Trade Center in New York. Bush himself mentioned it this morning, noting Card's service "on a terrible day when America was attacked."

Bush was seated in a classroom of second graders in a Florida classroom, reading a children's book, when Card came up and whispered to him: "A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack."

But quite notably, Card didn't say: Mr. President, you'd better come and do something about it. And Bush remained frozen in his seat for seven minutes.

Bush Cozying Up to Reporters

At the same time that the Bush administration is publicly attacking the press for ignoring good news out of Iraq, and the White House continues to duck questions about critical issues, the president himself has launched a personal and off-the-record charm offensive.

It's a wonderful way for him to distract journalists from the central question of his presidency -- his loss of credibility. He has the reporters over to his residence, schmoozes them, asks them about their family.

Bush knows that demanding answers from the president without appearing to be disrespectful to the office is a challenge for White House reporters. Add the fact that he seems like such a nice guy and he knows your kid's name, that just makes it even harder.

I'm told that the off-the-record meetings were originally intended as get-to-know-you sessions just for the new people on the White House beat -- but so many of the regulars caught wind of it that they all started bugging press secretary Scott McClellan, who opened it up to a wider group.

Charles Babington writes in The Washington Post: "As he defends his Iraq policy with a public campaign of speeches and a recent news conference, President Bush also has been waging a private campaign that has included off-the-record sessions with White House reporters, sources said yesterday. . . .

"Last week's session involved reporters from several prominent broadcast and print outlets, including ABC News and The Washington Post. Under the off-the-record ground rules, the journalists were barred from reporting what was discussed. White House officials said they also hoped the meetings' mere existence would remain under wraps. That proved impossible when journalists from The Post who were not participants in the session, as well as those at other publications, learned of the meetings from sources outside the paper and began to report on them. . . .