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Hayden appointed CIA Director
The
Washington Post reports on the nomination of Gen. Michael V. Hayden as
CIA director of the C. I. A. Stephen Hadley, Bush's national security
adviser appearance on Good Morning America is quoted:
"I would point out that there have been several heads of the Central
Intelligence Agency who have been military officers," Hadley said on "Good
Morning America."
"There are officers serving in that agency. The question is not military
versus civilian; the question is the best man for that job. And Mike Hayden
really has that capacity.
"He's run a big organization. He knows how to transform a big organization.
He's committed to the agenda of intelligence reform."
"And," said Hadley, "he's not just a military officer; he's had broad
experience in the intelligence business. He's been involved in human
intelligence, has been in an embassy overseas, which involves him in the
overseas operations. He's served on the National Security Council staff in
terms of the presidency of Bush 41," Hadley continued. "So this is a kind of
broad-gauged guy, a change agent committed to reform, and he can really do
great things for the country as head of the Central Intelligence Agency."
Rove on the loose
The
NY Times covers the fact that White House advisor Karl Rove is doing
what he does best, win elections:
In regular West Wing breakfast sessions catered by the White House mess, Mr.
Rove and the White House political director, Sara Taylor, have already been
reaching out to nervous and vulnerable Republicans, three at a time, laying
out an emerging three-prong attack on Democrats over national security,
taxes and health care.
In meetings at the White House, aboard Air Force One and in candidates' home
states, Mr. Rove is trying to rally Republicans to stand by the president
and his agenda.
He has focused in particular on uniting them behind the administration's
proposals to overhaul immigration, which include guest worker provisions
that conservatives despise; the Iraq war, which has driven Mr. Bush's poll
numbers sharply downward; and the Medicare prescription drug program, which
the administration says will cost $872 billion from 2006 to 2014 and which
Mr. Bush backed enthusiastically despite complaints from conservatives that
it was a vast expansion of the social welfare state.
Democrats need a net gain of six seats to win control of the Senate, and 15
for the House. With the overall outcome potentially coming down to one or
two races, nearly every district and state seems to be getting some
attention from Mr. Rove. He enlisted the president, and called on his own,
to persuade Representative Elton Gallegly of California, a 10-term veteran,
to reconsider a decision to drop his planned re-election campaign because of
health worries.
The Grassley show
Robert Novak in his column reports that Sen. Grassley has been missing
joint meetings on tax policy:
Sen. Charles Grassley, [R-IA] chairman of the Senate Finance Committee,
turned down a request to meet in the Oval Office with President Bush and
other Senate and House tax legislators last Tuesday because he was scheduled
with Iowa constituents.
That marked Grassley's second recent boycott of a high-level meeting about
tax legislation. A week earlier, he declined to attend an 8:30 p.m. session
in Speaker Dennis Hastert's office because it was so late in the day.
The message from Grassley is that as Finance Committee chairman he is
running his own show and does not want to be bossed around by either the
president or the speaker.
Voter distribution
The Washington Post reports on a study by political scientist Gary Jacobson
that shows if the Democrats could redistrict in their favor they might win:
Jacobson's research shows a little more than half of all the nation's 435
congressional districts over recent decades consistently favored Republican
presidential candidates. A little less than 40 percent went for Democrats.
(The remainder had a mixed pattern.) Jacobson, at the University of
California at San Diego, said this is due to an "inefficient" distribution
of Democratic voters, with many concentrations of 60 percent or more in
urban areas and places with large numbers of minorities. Republicans, he
found, are distributed more evenly, yielding more districts in which GOP
voters have a slimmer but sturdy majority.
Jacobson's study highlighted another problem for Democrats as they labor to
shed minority status: the decline in split-ticket voting.
In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, about 40 percent of all House Democrats
represented districts that voted for GOP presidential candidates. Many were
in the South, where local Democratic politicians often disowned the
"national" Democratic Party and many endorsed the GOP presidential nominee.
Will Rove be indicted?
The
Washington Post reports that White House advisor Karl Rove will know
this month whether he will be indicted by special prosecutor Patrick
Fitzgerald for lying to the grand jury:
Did Rove, who was deeply involved in defending President Bush's use of
prewar intelligence about Iraq, lie about a key conversation with a reporter
that was aimed at rebutting a tough White House critic?
Fitzgerald, according to sources close to the case, is reviewing testimony
from Rove's five appearances before the grand jury. Bush's top political
strategist has argued that he never intentionally misled the grand jury
about his role in leaking information about undercover CIA officer Valerie
Plame to Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper in July 2003. Rove testified
that he simply forgot about the conversation when he failed to disclose it
to Fitzgerald in his earlier testimony.
Fitzgerald is weighing Rove's foggy-memory defense against evidence he has
acquired over nearly 2 1/2 years that shows Rove was very involved in White
House efforts to beat back allegations that Bush twisted U.S. intelligence
to justify the Iraq war, according to sources involved in the case.
That evidence includes details of a one-week period in July 2003 when Rove
talked to two reporters about Plame and her CIA role, then reported the
conversations back to high-level White House aides, according to sources in
the case and information released by Fitzgerald as part of the ongoing leak
investigation.
Additionally, one former government official said he testified that Rove
talked with White House colleagues about the political importance of
defending the prewar intelligence and countering Plame's husband, former
ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. It was Wilson who accused Bush of twisting
intelligence about Iraq's efforts to obtain nuclear material from Africa.
The official refused to be named out of fear of angering Fitzgerald and the
White House.
Robert Luskin, Rove's lawyer, responded that "just because Rove was involved
in the defense of the White House Iraq policy, it does not follow that he
was necessarily involved in some effort to discredit Wilson personally. Nor
does it prove that there even was an effort to disclose Plame's identity in
order to punish Wilson."
Rove expects to learn as soon as this month if he will be indicted -- or
publicly cleared of wrongdoing -- for making false statements in the CIA
leak case, according to sources close to the presidential adviser.
Vilsack’s travels
The
Des Moines Register’s Jane Norman covered what the Charlotte Observer
said about Governor Tom Vilsack (D-IA) when he visited that state in
exploration for higher office:
The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer says it could also be a political asset after
the last two elections, in which the Democratic nominees came from somewhat
more lofty backgrounds.
Dick Polman of the Observer writes that Jerry Meeks, the party chairman in
North Carolina, says: "We need to hear a life story that Southerners can
appreciate. A life story that embodies the theme of America as a land of
hope and opportunity."
Polman notes that "Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack triumphed over an abusive mother.
John Edwards was the son of a millworker. Ex-Virginia Gov. Mark Warner was
the first in his family to graduate from college."
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