Just to follow up on the Ridge announcement for a moment, I’m wondering at what point we can start to call the shuffling within Bush’s cabinet a “mass exodus.”
There were six quick departures immediately after the election (Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, Justice, and State). Yesterday, Ridge made it seven. This week, we learned that John Snow is almost certainly gone, which would make it eight. Rumors also surround Tommy Thompson at HHS and Norman Mineta at Transportation, both of whom have indicated they intend to leave, which would ultimately bring the number of departing cabinet members to a whopping 10, including three of the cabinet’s “big four” positions (State, Defense, Treasury, and Justice).
Among two-term presidents in the post-WWII era, Nixon set the high mark, replacing nine cabinet secretaries after the 1972 election, a record which Bush may be poised to break. Oddly enough, Bush saw this as a model of what to avoid — for continuity, morale, and effectiveness, Bush placed an emphasis on minimal turnover. At least that’s what the White House was saying before more than half the cabinet made a beeline for the exit.
Part of the changes seem to be due to the realization that Bush’s cabinet is made up of people with little to no power or influence. I mentioned earlier the example of Ridge getting overruled by Karl Rove on improving safety rules at American chemical plants. This was common at other agencies as well, leading to an environment in which capabale and qualified officials no longer want to be considered for cabinet posts.
[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?”
Slate’s David Greenberg noted recently that cabinet posts have never mattered as much as they should, but Bush’s team has been even less relevant than previous cabinets. Greenberg found an interesting quote indicating that this decline of influence was an intentional move by the Bush administration.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, with the out-of-control administrations of Johnson and Nixon, Americans began to worry about the growth of presidential power. The Cabinet briefly regained some luster as an important check on White House clout. Under Nixon, after all, Attorney General Elliot Richardson had heroically refused to fire the Watergate special prosecutor, prompting the Saturday Night Massacre that hastened Nixon’s fall. Defense Secretary James Schlesinger famously ordered the military not to obey Nixon should he try to use armed force to stay in power after being impeached. But one White House veteran, commenting a few years later on the view that presidential power needed such restraints, strongly disagreed with the prevailing wisdom. “That’s what the press would like you to think, and many academics, but it wasn’t the organizational system that caused Watergate,” the official told political scientist Anthony J. Bennett. “… I believe that if you have cabinet government, you have chaos.”
Who was this opponent of cabinet government? The speaker was Dick Cheney.