OK, so Alberto Gonzales, after laborious, pain-staking preparation for weeks, bombed this week before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The pressure on the AG to resign has reached an almost comical level, but the president continues to say, “Gonzo, you’re doing a heckuva job.”
If you’re a White House staffer and/or a Republican insider who knows the Attorney General has to step aside, what do you do? You pick up the phone and start chatting with reporters.
Bush expressed “full confidence” in Gonzales through a spokeswoman and praised his “fantastic” service, in hopes of quashing speculation that the attorney general would be pushed out. But a wide array of Republicans described Gonzales with phrases such as “dead man walking,” and even some White House aides privately voiced hope that he will step down on his own.
The continuing erosion of Republican support suggested that Gonzales lost ground during a day of often-hostile questioning by the Senate Judiciary Committee, rather than repairing the damage caused by the dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys. Nearly every committee Republican appeared skeptical of Gonzales’s handling of the firings and their aftermath. Telephone calls yesterday to dozens of GOP lawmakers, lobbyists, and current and former Bush administration officials found almost no support for the attorney general. […]
“Everybody at the White House … all think he needs to go, but the president doesn’t,” said a Republican who consulted the Bush team yesterday. Another White House ally said Bush and Gonzales are ignoring reality: “They’re the only two people on the planet Earth who don’t see it.”
A third Republican intimately familiar with sentiment inside the White House said the hope is that Gonzales will leave on his own. “At some point, he’ll figure out that it’s not a sustainable situation,” the Republican said.
It’s an indirect strategy, isn’t it? These GOP insiders, including White House aides, obviously want Gonzales to resign, but they can’t get the president to ask and they can’t lean on the AG directly. They seem to be hoping that dishing to the Post will get the job done.
They also have to hope, of course, that Gonzales, unlike his boss, reads the newspaper.
Or maybe watches TV.
White House insiders told CNN after the testimony that Gonzales hurt himself during his testimony.
The sources, involved in administration discussions about Gonzales, said two senior level White House aides who heard the testimony described Gonzales as “going down in flames,” “not doing himself any favors,” and “predictable.”
“Everyone’s putting their best public face on,” one source said, “but everyone is discouraged. Everyone is disappointed.”
And the administration officials who talked to CNN on Friday agreed that Gonzales’ statements did little to help him regain credibility on Capitol Hill and, in fact, may have lost him the few supporters he had left.
One official, who works closely with Gonzales, described him as “out of touch” with the political pulse in Washington. Maybe, but just how impenetrable can his bubble be?
As for the official White House line, spokesperson Dana Perino praised Gonzales yesterday as “our number one crime fighter.”
Wouldn’t his replacement be “our number one crime fighter,” too?