The fact that Treasury Secretary John Snow will soon be forced out is no longer in question; speculation now turns to his replacement.
The New York Times focused attention yesterday on Bush’s right-hand man (not Cheney, the other right-hand man).
President Bush has decided to replace John W. Snow as treasury secretary and has been looking closely at a number of possible replacements, including the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., Republicans with ties to the White House say.
Card, however, “categorically” ruled out the possibility yesterday afternoon. Which leads us to former Sen. Phil Gramm.
Conservative interest groups and some other Republicans in Washington have been pressing the White House to consider Phil Gramm, the former Republican senator from Texas who was an economics professor before getting into politics.
The adviser to the White House said Mr. Gramm was under consideration, but that the prospects of him getting the job were unclear.
There are a few interesting things to watch out for, not the least of which is whether anyone, including Gramm, actually wants the job.
Even if Bush wanted to replace Snow with a respected economist, it’s unlikely anyone who would take the post seriously would want to join the team after O’Neill’s and Snow’s experiences.
[T]he White House has found it harder to attract a top-flight team because some candidates are unwilling to give up lucrative posts to come to Washington to be White House cheerleaders.
One economist, who was rumored to be up for a position on the Council of Economic Advisers, said he could not take a job that has been steadily pushed to the sidelines over the past two years. “You can’t be attracted to a job where you’d be out of the loop,” he said.
[…]
[S]ome Republican economists say the administration’s top economic jobs have been marginalized, while their inhabitants have been publicly humiliated.
“Why would you want to take a job where you have no influence?” asked Bruce Bartlett of the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis. “What’s the point?”
Would Gramm, who once fancied himself presidential material, want to return to Washington to become a Bush sycophant? To take a post that has lost its historical significance and join a team in which cabinet secretaries have little power and even less influence? I have a hard time picturing it.
For that matter, if the job is effectively that of a “cheerleader” for Bush’s economic policies, couldn’t the White House find someone with a little more…cheer? Gramm is one of the more dour, unlikable, and unfriendly people to serve in the Senate in recent memory. Put it this way, Gramm makes Dick Cheney look like Ned Flanders. When thinking about someone Bush could turn to in order to rally support for his economic plan, Gramm hardly seems like the ideal choice.
On the other hand, Gramm’s confirmation hearings could be highly entertaining. As Dan Gross told Noam Scheiber yesterday:
Just this morning I was dreaming about the prospect of a CNN split screen with his confirmation hearing on the left, and his self-satisfied professional-economist warnings that the 1993 Clinton budget/tax hike would instantly lead to a recession on endless loop on the right.
It’s one thing to be an economic ignoramus if you’re a career bureaucrat. It’s quite another thing — and an altogether more amusing one — to be an economic ignoramus when you’ve got a Ph.D. in the subject.
That’s a good point. When it comes to economic policies, few have been as spectacularly wrong as Phil Gramm. That’s probably what helped him make it onto Bush’s short list.