Bush changes: Rove shifts, press chief quits

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Bush changes: Rove shifts, press chief quits
Top aide to focus on midterm elections; McClellan parried tough questions

WASHINGTON - A Bush administration shake-up continued Wednesday, with White House press secretary Scott McClellan announcing his resignation and a source saying that adviser Karl Rove would shed some duties.

Appearing with Bush on the White House South Lawn just before the president boarded a helicopter at the start of a trip to Alabama, McClellan, who has parried especially fiercely with reporters on Iraq and on intelligence issues, told Bush: “I have given it my all sir and I have given you my all sir, and I will continue to do so as we transition to a new press secretary.”

Bush said McClellan had “a challenging assignment.”

“I thought he handled his assignment with class, integrity,” the president said. “It’s going to be hard to replace Scott, but nevertheless he made the decision and I accepted it. One of these days, he and I are going to be rocking in chairs in Texas and talking about the good old days.”

McClellan was named press secretary in June 2003, not long after the United States invaded Iraq and had first been a deputy to Ari Fleischer in the job — a White House position with daily visibility rivaling virtually everyone there except the president.

New Rove duties
Also, a senior administration official revealed another move in the ongoing shake-up of Bush’s staff, saying Rove, the president's longtime confidant and adviser, is giving up oversight of policy development to focus more on politics with the approach of the fall midterm elections.

The source told NBC that the shift was “an acknowledgement of the tough political climate.”

Rove “is the best pitcher in the league in terms of politics and strategy,” the source added, so “it’s obvious” he should focus on the mid-term elections.

Just over a year ago, Rove was promoted to deputy chief of staff in charge of most White House policy coordination. That new portfolio came on top of his title as senior adviser and role of chief policy aide to Bush.

But now, the job of deputy chief of staff for policy is being given to Joel Kaplan, now the White House’s deputy budget director.

The move signals a possibly broad effort to rearrange and reinvigorate Bush’s staff by new chief of staff Joshua Bolten. Bolten moved into his position last week; Kaplan was his No. 2 person at the Office of Management and Budget.

At least for the time being, the promotion of Kaplan would leave Bush with three deputy chiefs of staff: Rove, Kaplan and Joe Hagin, who oversees administrative matters, intelligence and other national security issues.

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Ohioan picked to control budget
President nominates Portman to become director of OMB

WASHINGTON — As President Bush’s new budget director, former Ohio Congressman Rob Portman will try to balance the White House’s push for billions of dollars of tax cuts with the reality of record federal deficits and soaring government spending on health care.

It is a fiscal maze that can be negotiated, both the Cincinnati Republican and Bush said yesterday after the president nominated Portman to become director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. That office is responsible for submitting the administration’s annual budget to Congress.

Portman’s elevation may be just the latest step in a shake-up of top administrative positions. Bush, while reaffirming his support for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, yesterday promised that more changes are coming.

Portman, who would leave his post as U.S. trade representative, pledged to work with his former congressional colleagues to address the "unsustainable growth in entitlement spending" such as for Medicare and Social Security.

He signaled that this year’s $336 billion budget deficit would be reduced only by curbing spending. Standing next to Bush in the Rose Garden, Portman said Congress should make permanent the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which he and the president say have sparked an economic expansion for most of the nation.

"Now is not the time to risk losing ground by raising taxes," Portman said. "Instead, we must continue pro-growth pol- icies and tighten our fiscal belts in order to cut the deficit in half by 2009."

Bush said he is confident that Portman will tackle the deficit as aggressively as he took on the job of helping to gain congressional approval of a controversial Central American trade pact soon after being confirmed as trade representative.

The president said Portman, who represented his Cincinnati-area district in the U.S. House from 1993 until his confirmation as trade negotiator last April, was part of the House GOP leadership team and a member of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee.

"Rob’s leadership in Congress was also marked by an ability to work across the aisle and bring people together to get things done," Bush said. "As director of OMB, Rob will have a leading role on my economic team. He will be a powerful voice for pro-growth policies and spending restraint."

Portman, if confirmed by the Senate, would run one of the most powerful offices in the executive branch. The OMB director determines how much money will be spent by each federal agency and submits the president’s annual budget every January.

"You have your hand in virtually every domestic debate that is going on. It’s a massive portfolio because you are making decisions on the purse strings for every federal program," said Jim Morrell, a senior associate at the publicaffairs firm of Quinn Gillespie and a former Portman congressional aide.

"It’s an immensely powerful position here in Washington and particularly within the White House."

Sen. George V. Voinovich, R-Ohio, who telephoned his congratulations to Portman, said he is "qualified to do that job," but he warned that it would be virtually impossible to balance the federal budget while simultaneously extending the Bush tax cuts, most of which are scheduled to expire at the end of the decade.

Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a Washington organization that champions balanced budgets, called Portman "an excellent choice." But Bixby said that if "you want to extend the tax cuts and want at the same time to put us on a path to a balanced budget, you have to come up with some extraordinary spending cuts, which the administration hasn’t proposed."

Viewed as a Bush confidant who also has the respect of Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill, Portman is one part of a White House shake-up that began last month when Joshua Bolten left his post as director of the OMB to replace Andrew Card as White House chief of staff.

That shuffle includes replacing Portman as trade representative with Susan Schwab, who served as Portman’s deputy in the trade department.

In addition, the White House has made little secret of its desire to replace John Snow as secretary of the treasury. And despite a public show of support from Bush, Rumsfeld has been facing severe criticism.

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Dump Cheney for Condi, Bush urged



REPUBLICANS are urging President George W Bush to dump Dick Cheney as vice-president and replace him with Condoleezza Rice if he is serious about presenting a new face to the jaded American public.

They believe that only the sacrifice of one or more of the big beasts of the jungle, such as Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, will convince voters that Bush understands the need for a fresh start.

The jittery Republicans claim Bush’s mini-White House reshuffle last week will do nothing to forestall the threat of losing control of Congress in the November mid-term elections.

Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard magazine and author of Rebel in Chief, a sympathetic new biography of Bush, said: “There are going to have to be sweeping personnel changes if people are going to take a second look at the Bush presidency.”

Barnes, who is close to the White House, said he believed Cheney would be willing to stand down in order to help Bush. “It’s unlike Bush to dump somebody whom he likes and respects,” he cautioned. “But the president needs to do something shocking and dramatic such as putting in Condoleezza Rice.”

Cheney appeared to have beeen caught napping during a visit to the Oval Office by China’s president, Hu Jintao, on Friday, although he claimed he had been looking down at his notes. It has often been said that he would cite medical reasons should he ever resign.

The best scenario, Barnes added, would be for Bush to announce that “Dick Cheney will be around as an outside adviser and I can call him on the phone, but I’d like to anoint somebody who I think will be the next leader of the United States”.

Tom Edmonds, a leading Republican consultant, said the White House had failed to grasp that the party was in desperate straits. “I have never talked to so many disenchanted Republicans,” he said. “The president even stonewalled the minor changes he made by talking about how he was really perfectly happy with his team. He didn’t even give himself wiggle room.”

One Republican strategist, who did not want to be named, said: “If I were Bush I would think of changing Cheney. It is one of the few substantial things he can do to change the complexion of his administration. The rest is nibbling around the edges.”

Bush’s new chief of staff, Joshua Bolten, quickly put his stamp on the inner workings of the White House last week by stripping Karl Rove, Bush’s most powerful adviser, of his policy-making role and ordering him to concentrate on his forte: winning elections.

Bolten also obtained the resignation of the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, who was nicknamed Piggy in a recent Vanity Fair article because of his resemblance to the hapless victim of the feral boys in Lord of the Flies.

Tony Snow, a Fox News broadcaster who is favoured to replace McClellan, has previously described the Bush administration as “listless” and in dire need of change.

But a new communicator cannot reinvent an old team. Edmonds believes Rumsfeld should go. “The president is loyal to a fault,” he said. “His loyalty shouldn’t be to Rumsfeld but to the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. We need a new, strong face on the war, such as Senator John McCain or Joe Lieberman (the pro-war Democrat senator).”

Bob Schieffer, a CBS news television presenter, said Bush may yet drop Rumsfeld despite his strong declaration of support. “It was also this president who said, ‘Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job’ and that was just before Brownie got canned,” Schieffer said, referring to Michael Brown, who directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s much-criticised response to Hurricane Katrina.

John Snow, the Treasury secretary, has been left twisting in the wind while replacements for him are openly discussed, and Rob Portman has been brought in to replace Bolten as budget director. Suggestions that Harriet Miers, Bush’s White House counsel who was dropped as his supreme court nominee, would be next to go were denied last week.

Supporters say Bush should live up to his bold claim that he is “the decider” — made while rejecting recent calls for Rumsfeld’s resignation from half a dozen senior generals — and start firing senior people rather than backroom staff.

“If the Democrats win either the House of Representatives or the Senate it will be death and torment. It will be horrible for Bush,” said Barnes. A Democrat win could lead to moves to impeach Bush for leading the country to war on allegedly false pretences, or at the very least, to bog down the president’s legislative programme until he leaves office in 2008.

Rove has been privately warning party activists to expect some losses in the mid-term elections. One insider said: “I’ve heard him say at several party gatherings that the president wasn’t supposed to win in 2000, but he did. We’ve increased our margins of victory time and again. We can’t just keep winning on top of winning so we’re bound to slip back, but we’re still doing better than you would historically expect.”

Only one two-term victor has been more unpopular than Bush at a similar six-year stage in his presidency — Richard Nixon in the months before he was impeached.

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Text: President Bush and Tony Snow
Fox News host introduced as new White House press secretary


BUSH: Good morning. I'm here in the briefing room to break some news: I've asked Tony Snow to serve as my new press secretary.

Tony already knows most of you, and he's agreed to take the job anyway. And I'm really glad he did.

I'm confident that Tony Snow will make an outstanding addition to this White House staff. I am confident he will help you do your job.

My job is to make decisions. And his job is to help explain those decisions to the press corps and the American people.

He understands like I understand that the press is vital to our democracy.

As a professional journalist, Tony Snow understands the importance of the relationship between government and those whose job it is to cover the government.

He's going to work hard to provide you with timely information about my philosophy, my priorities and the actions we are taking to implement our agenda.

He brings a long record of accomplishment to this position. He has spent a quarter of a century in the news business. He's worked in all three major media: print, radio and television.

He started his career in 1979 as an editorial writer for the Greensboro Record in North Carolina. He went on to write editorials for the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk. He ran the editorial pages in both the Daily Press of Newport News and The Washington Times. He's written nationally syndicated columns for both the Detroit News and USA Today.

During his career in print journalism, he's been cited for his work by the Society of Professional Journalists, The Associated Press and Gannett.

For seven years he served as the host of "Fox News Sunday." Most recently, he reached Americans all across our country as the host of "The Tony Snow Show" on Fox News Radio and "Weekend Live with Tony Snow" on the Fox News Channel.

He's not afraid to express his own opinions. For those of you who've read his columns and listened to his radio show, he sometimes has disagreed with me. I asked him about those comments, and he said, "You should have heard what I said about the other guy."

I like his perspective, I like the perspective he brings to this job, and I think you're going to like it, too.

Tony knows what it's like to work inside the White House. In 1991, he took a break from journalism to serve as director of speechwriting and deputy assistant to the president for media affairs.

He's taught children in Kenya. He belongs to a rock band called Beats Working. He's a man of courage. He's a man of integrity. He loves his family a lot. He is the loving husband of a fine wife and the father of three beautiful children.

He succeeds a decent and talented man in Scott McClellan. I've known Scott since he worked for me in Texas. We traveled our state together, we traveled our country together, and we have traveled the world together. We have also made history together.

Scott should be enormously proud of his service to our nation in an incredibly difficult job. I will always be grateful to him. I will always be proud to call him friend.

I appreciate Scott's offer to help Tony Snow prepare for his new job. And I'm proud to welcome Tony as part of our team. Appreciate you, buddy.

SNOW: Well, Mr. President, I want to thank you for the honor of serving as press secretary.

And just a couple of quick notes.

I'm delighted to be here. One of the things I want to do is just make it clear that one of the reason I took the job is not only because I believe in the president, because, believe it or not, I want to work with you. These are times that are going to be very challenging. We've got a lot of big issues ahead and we've got a lot of important things that all of us are going to be covering together. And I am very excited and I can't wait.

And I want to thank you, Mr. President, for the honor. And thank all your guys for your forbearance. And I look forward to working with you. Thanks.

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Tony Snow new Bush press secretary
Fox News commentator to take over for Scott McClellan

President Bush introduced Fox News commentator Tony Snow as his new press secretary today, replacing the outgoing Scott McClellan.

Speaking to reporters at the White House, Bush said Snow is "not afraid to express his own opinions."

"For those of you who've read his columns and listened to his radio show, he sometimes has disagreed with me," Bush said. "I asked him about those comments, and he said, 'You should have heard what I said about the other guy.'"

The Washington Post reports Snow accepted the job after being assured by top officials that "he would be not just a spokesman but an active participant in administration policy debates."

Snow told the White House press corps this morning one of the reasons he took the job is "not only because I believe in the president, because, believe it or not, I want to work with you. "

"These are times that are going to be very challenging," he said. "We've got a lot of big issues ahead and we've got a lot of important things that all of us are going to be covering together. And I am very excited and I can't wait. "

Snow, a former speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush, is the first Washington pundit to become the White House's top media voice, though others, including Clinton press secretary George Stephanopoulos, have become pundits after holding the communications position.

"President Bush hates responding to the press, hates responding to political enemies – he thinks it's beneath him," Snow said on Fox News in March, reports the Post. "He's got a stubborn streak."

He said at the time Bush needed "a series of vigorous defenses" of his position.