Bush Crises Raise Criticism of Chief of Staff's Management Style
By ANNE E. KORNBLUT
WASHINGTON, Oct. 17 - With Karl Rove distracted by the intensifying C.I.A. leak scandal, some of the Bush administration's other challenges in recent months have cast a longer shadow on Andrew H. Card Jr., for years a guiding force as the White House chief of staff.
His office oversaw the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, coordinating federal assistance that was broadly condemned as too slow. Mr. Card personally managed the selection of Harriet E. Miers for the Supreme Court, a choice that has splintered the Republican Party and left the administration scrambling to rescue her nomination.
The confluence of crises, all running through Mr. Card's suite just steps from the Oval Office, has some critics asking whether he needs to clean house or assert himself more forcefully - or at least consider a course correction before Mr. Bush is downgraded permanently to lame duck status.
"The lesson of both Katrina and Miers is that the system of decision making in the White House no longer meets the needs of the president," said David Frum, a former speechwriter for Mr. Bush who has been critical of the Miers choice.
Critics "could perhaps hold Andy accountable for not saying, 'Mr. President, this is going to be a mistake,' " said William Kristol, the conservative commentator and another vocal critic of the Miers nomination.
"He's always been - weaker is not quite fair, but he's always been a less powerful chief of staff than we're used to," Mr. Kristol said. "It worked well for a while. It seemed he was good at coordinating Karl and the vice president and Josh Bolten and Condi. And, again, to give him credit, in the first term things went pretty well, you have to say. So I don't really put the blame on Andy; he's doing what he's always done."
Mr. Card himself is rarely a target of criticism. Far more than other senior administration officials, he is admired by the staff, the president and lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle here.
Cheerful to the point of corniness, Mr. Card works ruthless hours, often arriving at his job before dawn and leaving after the dinner hour.
But his reputation as an effective steward of the executive bureaucracy has become harder to defend in light of recent events. Some critics of the administration ask whether previous chiefs of staff - imperious figures like James A. Baker III or Donald T. Regan - would have let so many problems accumulate.
The Miers nomination has touched off the most vitriol. Some conservatives and Rove allies say Mr. Card kept Mr. Rove in the dark about the seriousness of Mr. Bush's intentions until very late in the process, thus sidestepping the adviser who would have been best able to anticipate dissent among Republicans.
Mr. Card also ran a vetting process that critics sharply criticize as inherently flawed because it put William K. Kelly, Ms. Miers's deputy White House counsel, in charge of scrutinizing his own boss.
"Regardless of whether or not the vetting process was complete, it represented impossible conflicts of interest," the conservative columnist John Fund wrote last week in the online edition of The Wall Street Journal, naming Mr. Card as a chief culprit.
For Mr. Card, who has never claimed to be an assertive power broker, the criticism of his management style cuts at the very skills he prides himself in. Although he briefly served as transportation secretary under the first President Bush, most of his career in public service has been in the anonymous, but important, ranks of bureaucracy. He came into the Bush presidential campaign not as a political adviser but as the nuts-and-bolts manager of the Republican convention. Even now, five years at the side of the most powerful leader in the world, he describes his job like a good bureaucrat.
"I do not see my job as being anything other than a staffer responsible for the staff," Mr. Card said in an interview earlier this year.
Technically, Mr. Card is Mr. Rove's superior - and he is, according to people inside and outside the White House, sometimes privately at odds with Mr. Rove, his deputy chief of staff, who he believes can be overly political and disrespectful of proper White House boundaries.
Still, Mr. Card has shared the natural influence of the chief of staff's office with the more outspoken forces in the administration, especially Vice President Dick Cheney and Mr. Rove, say Republicans closely allied with Mr. Bush. The most famous image of Mr. Card, whispering into the president's ear that the nation was under attack on Sept. 11, 2001, is an apt one: when he gives his opinion to Mr. Bush, he does it so quietly that he is rarely assigned credit, or blame, for decisions that follow.
"My job is not to have my position prevail," Mr. Card said. "My job is to understand the president's position, challenge him and then enlighten other people to his expectations."
In previous administrations, "this chief of staff tried to play the role more like a prime minister, this chief of staff played the role more as a surrogate president, the C.E.O., that type of stuff," he said, refusing to name names but making it clear that he did not consider any of those models for his own tenure.
Repeatedly, Mr. Card brushed aside any suggestion that he played an important role in deciding the president's agenda or defining the substance of his presidency. "I don't want to say this - I plead with you not to see this as false humility, because I'm trying not to do that. But my job is not about me," he said. "It's my job to facilitate the president's ability to get the best out of his staff."
Yet it is the staff that has been so problematic in the second term. It took Michael D. Brown weeks to resign as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency after the flawed response to Hurricane Katrina. In the meantime, Mr. Card rushed back from his vacation home in Poland, Me., to try, unsuccessfully, to contain the damage.
Mr. Card was the obvious hurricane point man: he had been dispatched by the first President Bush to fix the disastrous federal response in South Florida to Hurricane Andrew in 1992. More than a decade later, in 2003, Mr. Card oversaw the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which absorbed FEMA into its ranks. In the early days after Hurricane Katrina, he sent his deputy, Joe Hagin, to the Gulf Coast to manage events on the ground.
The White House found itself mired in bureaucracy nonetheless, as Mr. Card stayed up through the night on the first Friday of the disaster sending faxes to Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana, trying to sort through chains of command. Mr. Card, who worked closely with Ms. Miers on that effort as well, said he had worked until 4:30 a.m. getting to "a position where we were all pulling our oars in the same direction, federal, state and local."
Still, another full week passed before Mr. Card finally had a long discussion with Mr. Brown about his mishandling of the storm. Even then, he said, he did not ask for Mr. Brown's resignation. "I asked him to think about his situation," he said. Mr. Brown resigned two days later.
If Mr. Card has had a heart-to-heart with Mr. Rove about the swirling criminal investigation into the leak of a C.I.A. operative's name, it has not been publicly disclosed.
"You're not going to get Andy to tell you he took Karl to the woodshed," a senior Republican official said.
Several administration officials said Mr. Card would be furious with any White House official who leaked information to the press. All spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak by the White House.
Several Republican advisers closely tied to the White House said Mr. Card had served as a counterweight to Mr. Rove at times, acting as a moderating voice and reining in Mr. Rove when he sought too much time with or sway over the president.
Still, with Mr. Rove as with Mr. Brown, Mr. Card, at a minimum, has not cracked down on top advisers before their problems have become a distraction. And what his most ardent supporters describe as Mr. Card's greatest attributes - in particular, his humility and patience - could well be at fault for some of the recent rockiness.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described him as a loyal but low-key adviser who was "not one of those chiefs of staff that thinks he ought to interpose himself between the advisers and the president."
"Andy is not just completely comfortable with, but has encouraged, the president's four or five key advisers to feel that they can walk into the Oval and just talk to the president," Ms. Rice said. "There have been chiefs of staff who want to control access all the time; that's just not Andy." |
