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Bush's tricky juggling act was apparent in other ways. He and his team are mindful that Al Gore received 90% of the African-American vote last month, and that was one reason Bush decided not to clutter the tableau of Powell's nomination Saturday afternoon with other names and faces. A top Bush aide said Bush planned to name Rice, also black, quickly thereafter. "Why do once what you can do twice?" asked the official.
It's no coincidence that the son was struggling to fill jobs in the agencies in which his father's Administration was weaker. Bush pere's Treasury Department was one of the more unremarkable of the past 25 years, and partly as a consequence, there is no wise, seasoned deputy waiting to take his rightful place in the Cabinet Room eight years later. Another factor is that Bush really is a Texan: the businessmen he knows best and is most comfortable with come not from the boardrooms of Wall Street but the oil fields of the Permian Basin and skyboxes of Major League Baseball. A Bush aide said it was harder than expected to find someone he is comfortable with--and who is also held in high regard by the financial markets in New York City.
The Treasury transition team spent more time last week changing search models than sifting resumes. Bush aides had floated the names of three Wall Streeters since Election Day--Don Marron of Paine Webber; Jack Hennessey, former CEO of Credit Suisse First Boston; and the former chairman of Chase Manhattan, Walter Shipley--but none has caught fire in Austin. Bush is concerned that he may have trouble selling his tax and Social Security plans, so last week headhunters set aside the idea of finding a financier for the post and rooted instead for a more political Treasury chief, in the mold of Lloyd Bentsen or James Baker. Soon trial balloons bearing the names of New York Governor George Pataki and New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman seemed to be everywhere.
Aides said Bush was less worried about two other economically sensitive posts--budget director and U.S. Trade Representative--because he felt that he had several strong candidates for each. Among those contending for the Trade Rep's job were Richard Parsons, president of Time Warner (the parent company of this magazine), and Bob Zoellick, who has spent the past 36 days in Tallahassee helping James Baker mastermind the Bush legal victory there. Zoellick, a Bush alum with a keen sense of the connection between foreign policy and the global economy, wants the trade job but was being gently nudged by Austin toward the even more complicated task of assembling and selling Bush's 2002 budget plan to Capitol Hill. Another candidate for the budget director's job was Rob Portman, a Cincinnati Congressman who--no one will be surprised to learn--worked in the White House for Bush's father.