Analysis: Gonzales Woe on Familiar Track
TOM RAUM | AP | March 27, 2007 12:17 PM EST
WASHINGTON — Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' battle to keep his job in a brewing constitutional clash is riveting. Yet the drama of a political appointee fighting for survival has played out many times in Democratic and Republican administrations alike.
Republican Rep. James Sensenbrenner, a House Judiciary Committee member, says the rising controversy could cause Gonzales to "die by a thousand cuts," a fate that has befallen many high-profile government officials.
President Eisenhower let go his longtime chief of staff, Sherman Adams, in a dispute over gifts from the textile industry.
President Nixon left L. Patrick Gray, the acting director of the FBI at the time of the 1972 Watergate burglary, "twisting slowly, slowly in the wind," as then-White House aide John Ehrlichman famously described it, until his nomination was withdrawn. Nixon later accepted the resignations of senior aides Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman and of Attorney General Richard Kleindienst before eventually resigning himself over the Watergate cover-up.
President Carter accepted the departure of longtime friend Bert Lance as budget director in a dispute over banking irregularities earlier in Lance's career. President Reagan accepted the under-pressure resignations of his attorney general, Ed Meese, and national security adviser John Poindexter.
The first President Bush sacked chief of staff, John H. Sununu after congressional complaints of arrogance and misuse of a government plane. The elder Bush had his oldest son _ the current president _ give Sununu the nudge when the former New Hampshire governor didn't seem to be getting the message.
Gonzales is being buffeted by questions about his role in last year's bungled ouster of eight federal prosecutors. The Democratic-controlled Congress is also looking into his earlier work as Bush's White House counsel. Subpoenas have been threatened for White House aide Karl Rove and former counsel Harriet Miers.
For now, Bush is standing by his longtime Texas friend and warning Congress against any "fishing expedition." But at the same time, the president has put the onus on Gonzales to set things right with his congressional detractors.
"The attorney general has some work to do on Capitol Hill, and that remains true today," said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino.
Yet Gonzales did not appear to be making much progress in winning over members of Congress, and it was not clear how hard he was trying.
"His biggest problem is that he never built a natural constituency, especially in the U.S. Senate," said Scott Reed, a GOP consultant who ran former Sen. Bob Dole's 1996 presidential campaign. "Now that they're pulling the alarm, there's no one to come help. He has no base of support in the Senate."
"These are challenging times for Republicans," Reed added.
Paul Light, a New York University professor of public policy, predicts Gonzales' resignation is just a matter of time. He says Gonzales will continue to lose support among Republicans, who have expressed annoyance about being misled, as he keeps amending his account of his role in the eight firings.
"It's not death by a thousand cuts. It's death by eight self-inflicted wounds," said Light.
In nearly every instance where a Cabinet member or top official has been forced to resign it is because they've become snarled "in a web of his or her own making. It involves not being forthright from the very beginning and often involves a relatively inelegant or hamhanded effort to repair the damage," Light said.
More lawmakers are calling for Gonzales' resignation, including Sen. John E. Sununu, R-N.H., the son of the chief of staff dismissed by Bush's father. Gonzales has "a cloud hanging over his credibility," said Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb.
Bruce Buchanan, a political science professor and longtime Bush watcher at the University of Texas, said that in encouraging Gonzales to mend fences on Capitol Hill, the president was "signaling that Gonzales has something to prove before he can expect permanent loyalty."
"Right now there's this evidence out there suggesting that Gonzales, who said he hadn't been in the loop, was in fact in the loop. If he can't reconcile that kind of evidence, then he's not likely to survive," Buchanan said.
Among other issues is Gonzales' March 13 denial that he participated in discussions or saw any documents about the firings, despite documents that show he attended a Nov. 27 meeting with senior aides on the topic, where he approved a detailed plan to carry out the firings. E-mails have also surfaced indicating that Rove had an early hand in the dismissals.
For the most part, presidents don't like firing people or asking for their resignations, said University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato. "They don't want to have to deliver the bad news themselves."
As to Gonzales' fate, "historically the single indication is when a critical mass of members of the president's own party starts calling for the resignation of the official," Sabato said. "Then he or she almost always goes."
Bush had no trouble replacing his first treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, who openly disagreed with him on the need for more tax cuts; or economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey, who argued early on _ correctly _ that the occupation of Iraq could cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars.
Somewhat more politically awkward for Bush were the forced resignations of Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary last November, shortly after Bush said he had no plans to replace him; and of Michael Brown as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency after Hurricane Katrina, despite Bush's upbeat, "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job."
On the other hand, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has managed to survive numerous calls to resign after Katrina.
President Clinton allowed Surgeon General Dr. Jocelyn Elders to resign in 1994 after a storm of controversy over her frank comments on sex education and masturbation. But despite serious conflicts between the Clinton White House and Attorney General Janet Reno, Reno never resigned. |
