Not Quite What We Had
in Mind
EDITORIAL, NYTimes on
the Web. March 29, 2006
For months now, people have been
urging President Bush to shake up his inner circle and bring in fresh air.
Perhaps in response, the White House chief of staff, Andrew Card Jr., resigned
yesterday. Mr. Bush opened the window — and in climbed his budget
director, Joshua Bolten, who used to be Mr. Card's deputy.
If this is what passes for a shake-up in this administration, the next two and a
half years are going to be grim indeed. This is a meaningless change, and
it simply sends the message that Mr. Bush lacks the gumption to trade in anyone
in the comforting, friendly cast of characters who have kept him cocooned since
his first inauguration.
It's hard to figure out what unmet need this change is supposed to fill.
There's been a lot of talk about how exhausted the original Bush team is.
But Mr. Bolten ought to be as pooped as everybody else. It takes just as
much energy to put together an out-of-whack, fiscally ruinous budget as it does
to mess up an invasion or ignore a cataclysmic hurricane.
Mr. Bolten has been giving the president advice for years, and the result has
been a deficit estimated at $371 billion. Perhaps he'll come up with a
better approach in his new job. We've heard that under Mr. Card's watch,
aides wound up showing Mr. Bush videos of TV news coverage of Hurricane Katrina
to convince their boss that it really was a problem. Maybe Mr. Bolten can
start the next budget discussion with some audiovisual aids — like an abacus.
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