All Shook Up – 4/19/06
The papers are abuzz this afternoon with the newly announced “staff shakeups” in the Bush administration. I won’t provide links since all the media are covering this and there is not much good analysis yet.
Here’s a summary: White House Chief of Staff Andy Card left his job a week or so ago, to be replaced by Joshua Bolten, then director of Management and Budget (who in turn was just replaced by former congressman Rob Portman). Yesterday White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said that Bolten had suggested that any administration officials who were thinking about leaving do so, as changes were going to be made. This morning brought the news that McClellan himself is one of those changes, as well as Karl Rove, who continues as Deputy Chief of Staff but drops his role as policy advisor to concentrate on the November elections. The blogs are all atwitter with the questions of what the change in Rove’s status really means, and most conclude that it means nothing, but the War Room on the liberal online magazine Salon speculates that it could mean that Rove has lost his security clearance because of his role in the Plame leak.
The position about which there has been the most noise is the one with the least shaking up. Despite calls from a number of senior military officers for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Bush announced yesterday in typical Bush language that Rumsfeld is staying put. As reported by the AP:
“I hear the voices and I read the front page and I know the speculation,” the president said testily. “But I'm the decider and I decide what's best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense.”
For weeks now, fretful Republicans who fear Bush’s falling approval ratings will hurt them at the polls in November have been calling for changes in the White House, an infusion of new blood that will energize the administration. What are the most likely causes for Bush’s fall in the ratings? Are the personnel changes that have been announced so far likely to affect those factors?