Thorny first year for Bush’s chief of staff

By Michael Abramowitz

updated 1:19 a.m. ET April 6, 2007

In just under a year as White House chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten has engineered a thorough overhaul of top administration personnel, pushed to end "happy talk" about conditions in Iraq, and tried to reposition the president on issues such as the environment, the budget, detainee treatment and health care.

Yet as Bolten approaches his first anniversary on the job, he and the president he serves find themselves as politically besieged as ever. President Bush's approval ratings -- 36 percent, according to the most recent Washington Post-ABC News poll -- are lower than when Bolten took over last April. And the president is embroiled in new controversies involving his attorney general and the handling of military health care, while trying to fend off an unexpectedly strong challenge to his Iraq policy from congressional Democrats.

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The setbacks suggest the limits of what colleagues and friends describe as Bolten's quiet drive to recast the administration along more pragmatic lines. Put in place to try to bring order to the administration, the low-key Bolten has found even incremental progress difficult to achieve, especially in a White House that has often valued political loyalty over competence, according to many lawmakers, political strategists and administration officials.

"The moves he has made would be serving the president very well and people would be applauding them, but I don't think many of them are being noticed or having much effect because of the combination of the war and the change in Congress," Indiana's Republican governor, Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., who served as White House budget director in Bush's first term, said in a recent interview.

Democrats argue that Bolten, 52, has had only marginal success in moving the White House out of an ideological tower after taking over the post from Andrew H. Card Jr. "He's tried to buffer the president's worst instincts, but the president's worst instincts seem to trump on the big issues," said John D. Podesta, who served as President Bill Clinton's last chief of staff. "I just think he has not changed the dynamic one whit."

Bitter fruit
Some former administration officials and GOP strategists say Bolten is reaping the bitter fruit of unresolved problems inside the White House, especially the president's tolerance of longtime loyalists such as Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and former counsel Harriet Miers, whom they do not consider first-tier operators. Although Bolten eventually moved to replace Miers, he did not do so until after the firings of eight U.S. attorneys was approved by the counsel's office in December -- the precipitating event in one of the recent crises.

A number of advisers close to the White House say they are amazed that Bolten has not told Gonzales it is time to leave, sparing Bush the unpleasant necessity of firing an old friend. The chief of staff has also come in for privately voiced criticism over his statement that he did not recall being informed of the firings. That assertion surprised even some officials in the White House, and veterans of past GOP administrations say they find it hard to believe that a chief of staff would not have been intimately involved with, or at least aware of, such a politically volatile move.

Some close to the White House saw it as an indication that Bolten has been compartmentalized; others said it was simply a sign of how much traffic the chief of staff must handle.

Bolten declined to speak on the record for this article, citing a long-standing policy of not cooperating with stories about himself.

White House officials and associates familiar with Bolten's thinking say his attitude is that the administration should ride out the current set of crises without panicking and keep its eye on the big issue -- Iraq. He still thinks progress is possible on an ambitious legislative agenda that includes immigration, education and energy. He is also proud of the changes he has brought about and believes they have made presidential decision-making crisper and more informed -- even if they have not yet paid off politically, the associates said.

A D.C. native who attended St. Albans School before Princeton and Stanford Law School, Bolten was one of the first non-Texans to join the Bush inner circle when he arrived in Austin in 1999 to take charge of policy development for the presidential campaign. At the time, Bolten was working for Goldman Sachs in London; he previously served in staff jobs in the administration of President George H.W. Bush.

In the current president's first term, Bolten was in charge of policy at the White House, and then Bush tapped him to run the budget office after Daniels's departure. When Bush decided that the White House needed a shake-up after the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, an unsuccessful campaign to overhaul Social Security and other second-term failures, he turned to Bolten.

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