Farewell to the chief

Posted by Mark Silva at 1:19 pm CDT

“My last flight on the plane, guys,’’ White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card said aboard Air Force One last night, on a return trip with the president from Des Moines to Washington. “It’s really sad.’’

The longest-serving presidential chief of staff since Sherman Adams served President Dwight Eisenhower, Card will leave behind him nearly five-and-a-half of the most eventful White House years in modern times when he calls it quits on Friday.

By then, the president will have left for Camp David for an Easter weekend with his family, and Joshua Bolten, the Bush policy adviser turned budget director who also has served the president since the start of his term, will settle into the West Wing as chief of staff at the most perplexing juncture in Bush’s presidency. With the president’s job approval ratings at an all-time low, a seemingly intractable conflict in Iraq that has lost the support of most Americans and a domestic agenda adrift – with immigration reform becoming only the latest goals of Bush cast into doubt by a resistant Congress – Card’s successor will assume the model of an uphill struggle.

But it’s Card who bears some consideration on this day. He rode the tall waves and the deep troughs of this administration. He was the one, at an elementary school event in Sarasota nearly five years ago, who discreetly whispered in the president’s ear: “America is under attack.’’

“One of the challenges we are facing is the reality of war,’’ Card somberly told a luncheon audience in Washington not long ago. “I wake up every morning understanding that.

“It was on that spectacular day in September 2001,’’ Card said, “when I whispered into the president’s ear that a second plane had hit and we were under attack,’’ that the president truly understood the meaning of the office. “He deals with that reality every day.’’

Of course, the war that Card and Bush like to remind everyone about at every chance they get, is the broader “war on terror.’’

Critics stand ready to remind this White House that the war in Iraq was a war of the president’s choosing, following a U.S.-led invasion based on intelligence which the administration later conceded was “wrong,’’ and not necessarily, as Bush calls it, “the front line in the war on terror.’’

But this is hardly the only crisis that Card has faced in his tenure. As the former transportation secretary for Bush’s father -- “Bush 41’’ in Swamp parlance – Card once was pressed into hurricane duty. He served as point man for an administration faced with the fact that the administration was failing in its response to the devastation that Hurricane Andrew wrought in South Florida in August 1992. And Card, at the time, was credited with doing what truly will be remembered as “a heck of a job.’’

“I was such a disaster when I was in the government that they named a storm after me – Hurricane Andrew,’’ Card joked at that recent luncheon.

So it seemed doubly surprising to those who had followed the federal government’s revamping of emergency preparedness following Andrew, that the government could perform such a fumbling job in its response to the even worse destruction of Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast last year.

But then, it turned out that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, bolstered after Andrew, had been neutered before Katrina. FEMA had been absorbed into the massive bureaucracy of the Homeland Security Department, which is another legacy of the Bush-Card years – the creation of the agency in 2002 representing the biggest reorganization of the government since the creation of the Defense Department in 1947.

These are only some of the things that Card will be explaining for years at luncheons like the one where he assured his audience that Bush’s “shoulders are broad, and he carries the burden well’’ – things such as a record federal budget deficit this year, exceeding $400 billion, and a war in Iraq and Afghanistan whose costs are approaching $400 billion.

The retiring chief of staff has happier fare for the luncheon circuit, of course. This includes a sweeping reform of public education in 2001 that has made public schools more accountable for the performance of their students (at the cost, some say, of “teaching for the test.’’) It includes tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 which reduced the tax burden of Americans generally, and seems to have had a particularly welcome impact on people earning more than $10 million a year, with their investment taxes slashed.

Bush credits those tax cuts for the improvement in the American economy, which now has produced an unemployment rate of 4.7 percent – lower, Bush notes, than the average rate of the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s combined. He hopes to make them permanent, which of course is only one of the legislative goals that appears nigh impossible in the remaining years of a president who has lost both public and congressional support.

Card voices that same undaunted optimism about democracy that Bush touts when he talks about the war in Iraq. The son of the Bay State says: “I’m not much of a student in history… But I know when our forefathers stood and witnessed the Boston massacre or participated in the tea party… that our march to democracy didn’t end when we got a Constitution… it was a messy process.’’

“The president, when he gave that first inaugural address, didn’t realize it, but he was facing a pretty significant storm in our country,’’ Card said at lunch a while back. “And that significant storm took on the condition of a perfect storm after Sept. 11.’’

“The person who has the worst job in government is Josh Bolten,’’ Card said at the time. His point was that the director of the president’s Office of Management and Budget had to approach every discussion with an assumption that a government program is not worth supporting.

But Bolten, an Ivy League- and Stanford-trained lawyer who helped Bush frame the domestic policies of his 2000 presidential election campaign and came to Washington to help Bush pursue them, is about to assume an even worse job than director of OMB. He is about to take Card’s job.

“There is a dark cloud gathering around the political world,’’ Card said at this luncheon held during the height of the debate over Bush’s newest nominee for the Supreme Court, Samuel Alito. “As the dark clouds gather, let’s not forget who we are.’’

They won’t forget Card around this White House very soon. He arrived before dawn each day and left after dark, and he’ll be gone for good on Good Friday, and now he has taken his last official ride on Air Force One. It was for the benefit of reporters in the press cabin, with a quick visit last night, that Card pronounced the occasion ‘really sad.’’ What's said up front on Air Force One stays on Air Force One.