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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (32635)	2/17/2009 1:07:10 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71588

Strike Three! Charges of conservatism sink Obama commerce nominee. FEBRUARY 13, 2009 By JAMES TARANTO Has President Obama broken the record for most cabinet nominees withdrawn in a new administration? The count currently stands at three: Gov. Bill Richardson (commerce), whose administration in New Mexico was the subject of a federal grand jury investigation; Tom Daschle (health and human services), who failed to pay taxes on his limousine; and now Sen. Judd Gregg (also commerce), who turns out to be a concerned about the integrity of the census. We're leaving out Nancy Killefer, the White House's would-have-been chief performance officer, since that was a staff rather than a cabinet position. The U.S. Senate Web site has a list of withdrawn cabinet nominations (just below the list of those that were voted down), but it is incomplete. It lists Daschle but not Richardson; it also lists Zoë Baird, Bill Clinton's first failed nominee for attorney general, but not Kimba Wood, his second one. (Both Baird and Wood hired nannies who lacked proper immigration papers; Baird also failed to remit payroll taxes on her nanny's employment.) Presumably Richardson's and Wood's nominations had not been formally submitted to the Senate before their withdrawal. Still, as far as we remember, Baird and Wood were the only Clinton nominees to go down in the early days; and Linda Chavez (who merely befriended an insufficiently documented immigrant) the only one of President Bush's early nominees to be withdrawn. It also seems that the phenomenon of cabinet nominees withdrawing over matters of ethics or other personal behavior is a new one. Before the Clinton administration, the last withdrawn nominee on the Senate list is Robert Wood, tapped by Lyndon B. Johnson as secretary of housing and urban development--on Jan. 9, 1969, 11 days before LBJ left office. The Senate never bothered to act on Wood's nomination. Prior to Wood, the most recent ex-nominee on the list is from the Grant administration. (We can think of at least one other omission, though: President Reagan's 1987 nomination of Bob Gates, now defense secretary, as director of central intelligence. Although this is not technically a cabinet post, Clinton's withdrawn 1997 nomination of Anthony Lake is listed on the Senate site.) One could take the withdrawal of so many cabinet nominees as a sign of the Obama administration's high standards--except that the cabinet already contains at least two members with documented tax problems: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. And Rep. Hilda Solis seems on track for confirmation as secretary of labor despite her husband's having failed to pay off tax liens as much as 16 years old until last week. Gregg apparently paid all his taxes, and was not accused of any violation of ethics or law. According to a statement he issued yesterday, he discovered while being vetted for the commerce post that he is a conservative Republican: It has become apparent during this process that this will not work for me as I have found that on issues such as the stimulus package and the Census there are irresolvable conflicts for me. Prior to accepting this post, we had discussed these and other potential differences, but unfortunately we did not adequately focus on these concerns. We are functioning from a different set of views on many critical items of policy. Politico reports that "the White House--where some aides were caught off guard by the withdrawal--initially responded harshly to Gregg's announcement, portraying the New Hampshire Republican as someone who sought the job and then had a 'change of heart.' " But the administration surely bears at least part of the blame for this foul-up. If Gregg is a conservative Republican, presumably there is some evidence of this on the public record. He has been in Congress for nearly a quarter-century; didn't he amass a voting record during that time? And in the course of four campaigns for the House and three for the Senate, didn't he make any public statements that might have tipped someone off about his ideology? Still, whatever the shortcomings of the White House vetting team, we suppose Gregg of all people should have known where he stood. The Associated Press quotes him explaining his mistake: Gregg said he had always been a strong fiscal conservative, and told the Associated Press: "For 30 years, I've been my own person in charge of my own views, and I guess I hadn't really focused on the job of working for somebody else and carrying their views, and so this is basically where it came out." So in a sense it's the Geithner story all over again: Gregg was caught in an error that stemmed from his being self-employed. And before you beat up on the president for the Gregg fiasco, just remember that whereas Obama almost let a conservative Republican slip through, George W. Bush actually had several of them in his cabinet. online.wsj.com