[Mb-civic] Senior White House Staff May Be Wearing Down - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Senior White House Staff May Be Wearing Down

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 13, 2006; A04

Andrew H. Card Jr. wakes at 4:20 in the morning, shows up at the White 
House an hour or so later, convenes his senior staff at 7:30 and then 
proceeds to a blur of other meetings that do not let up until long after 
the sun sets. He gets home at 9 or 10 at night and sometimes fields 
phone calls until 11 p.m. Then he gets up and does it all over again.

Of all the reasons that President Bush is in trouble these days, not to 
be overlooked are inadequate REM cycles. Like chief of staff Card, many 
of the president's top aides have been by his side nonstop for more than 
five years, not including the first campaign, recount and transition. 
This is a White House, according to insiders, that is physically and 
emotionally exhausted, battered by scandal and drained by political 
setbacks.

"By the time you get to year six, there's never a break . . . and you 
get tired," said Ed Rollins, who served five years in President Ronald 
Reagan's White House. "There's always a crisis. It wears you down. This 
has been a White House that hasn't really had much change at all. There 
is a fatigue factor that builds up. You sometimes don't see the crisis 
approaching. You're not as on guard as you once were."

To Rollins, the uproar over an Arab-owned firm taking over management of 
some American ports represents a classic example. Bush and his staff did 
not know about the arrangement approved by his administration, and after 
congressional Republicans revolted, issued an ineffective veto threat 
that only exacerbated the dispute, which climaxed with the collapse of 
the deal last week. "This White House would not have made this mistake 
two years ago," Rollins said.

Bush's problems go beyond the fatigue factor. An unpopular foreign war, 
high energy prices and the nation's worst natural disaster in decades 
have dragged his poll ratings down to the lowest level of any 
second-term president, other than Richard M. Nixon, in the last 
half-century. Lately it seems to many in the White House that they 
cannot catch a break -- insurgents blow up a holy shrine in Iraq, 
tipping the country toward civil war; Vice President Cheney accidentally 
shoots a hunting partner; a former top Bush adviser is arrested on theft 
charges.

But at a time when Bush needs his staff to be sharp to help steer past 
these political shoals and find ways to turn things around, he still has 
the same core group working since he turned his sights toward the White 
House. That group includes Card, deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, senior 
adviser Michael J. Gerson, counselor Dan Bartlett, budget director 
Joshua B. Bolten, press secretary Scott McClellan and national security 
adviser Stephen J. Hadley.

The succession of crisis after crisis has taken its toll. Some in the 
White House sound frazzled. While there are few stories of aides nodding 
off in meetings, some duck outside during the day so the fresh air will 
wake them up. "We're all burned out," said one White House official who 
did not want to be named for fear of angering superiors. "People are 
just tired."

White House officials are never genuinely away from the job. Tied to 
their BlackBerrys and cellular telephones, they are often called to duty 
even during rare vacations. Weekends are often just another workday. 
Hadley, for one, schedules a full day of meetings every Saturday. Card 
comes to the White House on days off to go bicycle riding with Bush.

While other professions demand 14-hour days and six- or seven-day weeks, 
few involve as much consequence, much less the intense scrutiny of the 
Internet age. A former Bush aide said, "You don't really realize until 
you're gone" just how exhausting it really is.

For the record, White House officials reject the suggestion that 
exhaustion has dulled their political instincts or contributed to the 
spate of trouble. "People work very, very hard," said White House 
communications director Nicolle Wallace, and "I'd be lying to say that 
there aren't some people on some days" who are weary. But "the other 
side of being here six years is incredible wisdom and steadiness and 
experience." Moreover, she added, "there's been enough turnover that 
there's new energy."

Any discussion of the fatigue factor in Republican circles invariably 
turns to Card, a low-key, self-effacing and well-liked Washington 
veteran who has been managing Bush's White House team since three weeks 
after the November 2000 election. Card brought considerable experience 
to the task, having worked in the Reagan White House, then serving 
President George H.W. Bush as deputy White House chief of staff and 
later transportation secretary.

In his current role, Card has proved to be a marathon man, capable of 
enduring the most brutal hours in perhaps the most brutal job in 
Washington for longer than anyone in modern times. Only one other person 
has served as White House chief of staff longer, Sherman Adams, the top 
aide to President Dwight D. Eisenhower in a far less frenetic, wired 
era. And if Card makes it to Nov. 1, he will surpass Adams's record, 
according to the Eisenhower library.

Card retains enormous respect inside and outside the White House, but 
some Republicans whisper about his judgment in the ill-fated selection 
of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court and the handling of Hurricane 
Katrina, to name two examples. Card declined to be interviewed, but has 
publicly dismissed concerns that his schedule has sapped his energy.

"All my life I have worked kind of this schedule," he told C-SPAN last 
fall. "When I was in college, I delivered newspapers early in the 
morning and worked at McDonald's late at night. So even when I was in 
high school, I would get up in the morning and get the newspapers ready 
for the paper boys early in the morning. So I've had this kind of 
lifestyle of early-to-bed and early-to-rise -- and so far seem to be 
doing pretty well."

Speculation among Republicans that Card would leave at the beginning of 
the year proved false or premature. Bush has resisted emulating Reagan, 
who brought in a fresh team led by Howard H. Baker Jr. when his second 
term was threatened by the Iran-contra scandal. Reagan and Clinton 
accepted Washington figures outside their own circles, and each had four 
chiefs of staff during their tenures. Bush emphasizes loyalty and 
surrounds himself mainly with people he knows.

Many Republicans were struck by the relative lack of ambition of Bush's 
State of the Union address, a program including alternative energy 
research, science education funding and health care tax breaks but 
nothing of the scope of last year's plan to reinvent Social Security. 
But some saw that as a reasonable response to the death of the Social 
Security effort, a recognition that it would be hard to enact dramatic 
domestic initiatives in a time of war. Others wondered if the White 
House was running out of ideas.

Grover G. Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform and an adviser to 
Rove, said he thinks the situation owes not to fatigue but to political 
realism at the White House. "What they don't have are unreasonable 
expectations of what can be moved through Congress," he said. "It's not 
a question of coming up with new ideas. Sometimes you just don't have 
the votes."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/12/AR2006031200821.html?nav=hcmodule
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