The Daily Background

So…… I’m guessing Gonzales’ replacement won’t be Chertoff:

In hopes of smoothing the nominee’s way, senior White House officials have contacted Congressional leaders to sound them out about candidates.

The contacts are routine for all cabinet nominations, although Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat who is on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he was struck by the cooperative tone he had heard in a conversation about nominees with the White House counsel, Fred F. Fielding, who is overseeing the search.

“In the past,” Mr. Schumer said in an interview, “the White House has talked about consultation, but they were the most wooden conversations I ever had. This was the first time there was a real back and forth.”

You know, the more I think about it (regardless of what’s being reported), I don’t think that they’ll pick Chertoff. To merely shuffle the head of one cabinet level position to fill the role of another cabinet level position just looks like of sheltered and overly dependent on an inner circle (of course, that isn’t to say that isn’t true).

They’ve done a lot of this type of recycling before- Rice moved from NSC to SecState, Gonzales himself started out as White House Counsel, Negroponte was DNI before he was Deputy SecState, and the list goes on. There are too many downsides for the Administration with Chertoff- revisiting questions about Katrina, they’d have to suffer through two high-profile confirmation hearings (one for Gonzales and one for Chertoff, presuming he gets past confirmation hearings for Gonzo’s job– not necessarily a given), and of course renewed mockery over what Chertoff’s “gut” says (though more seriously, questions of whether he just says things he can’t back up or explain in an attempt to scare people when things are going bad politically for the White House).

Also, there’s what I like to call the “creepyness factor.” The guy just plain creeps a lot of people out. Maybe it’s because he looks a little like a skeleton or a goul or something.

Mostly though, Chertoff is just too tainted. And with Democrats like Reid now saying that Gonzales was the wrong man for the job since the beginning, there’s a certain pressure that the Senate had better get it right this time around. Which means it’ll have to be somebody not affiliated with the Administration in any close sort of way, which makes me think the White House will tap somebody from the outside. Like Gonzales, Rumsfeld royally screwed up everything he touched. They brought in a set of totally “fresh eyes” when they hired Robert Gates, and I think they’ll do the same this time around.

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog