Why Spring Cleaning Isn't Likely to Boost the President

Jim Towey, the President's director of faith-based initiatives, isn't a typical Bush appointee. First of all, he's a Democrat. Second, his career trajectory never took him anywhere near the state of Texas. He worked on Capitol Hill for former Sen. Mark Hatfield, the Oregon Republican, and for Lawton Chiles, the former Democratic governor of Florida. He also had the distinction of being the late Mother Teresa's lawyer, and serving in her Calcutta mission. On Monday, seated under a picture of President Bush at prayer, Towey told a handful of reporters that he was leaving the White House to become president of St. Vincent College, a small Benedictine college in Latrobe, Pa., which, Towey noted, boasts the world's largest monastery and a proximity to the Rolling Rock brewery. (The latter seemed to most interest the press corps.) He showed off a picture of himself with President Bush from earlier this month after he told the President of his resignation. Bush has him in a playful headlock and joked at the time that Towey just took the job so he could be called "Mr. President."

Staffers are coming and going at the White House in what it's irresistible to compare to a spring cleaning. Some will move on for good, long-planned opportunities, as Towey did. Others, it's been hinted, will be asked to leave. On Monday, the trade ambassador, Rob Portman, a well-liked former Republican Congressman from Ohio, moved over to be the President's budget director. Indeed, the new chief of staff, Josh Bolten, has made it clear that anybody who's thinking of leaving should do it soon. The resignation of Scott McClellan on Wednesday — along with expected announcements about rearranging the functions of the deputy chiefs of staff — is the stuff of classic housecleaning. But whether it does more than interest Beltway denizens or leads to any shifts in policy and revitalizes the Bush administration is another matter.

Presidents have long turned to the staff shakeup or cabinet shuffle as a way of digging out of trouble. And George W. Bush is in trouble — his polls continue to hover in the mid-30s (although that's not bad compared to the GOP-controlled Congress, which, in one poll released this week, has sunk to a 23% approval rating.) After his famed "malaise" speech in 1979, in which he said the country was going through a "crisis of confidence," President Jimmy Carter offed his secretaries of Treasury and Health Education and Welfare. Ronald Reagan famously reshuffled his White House staff after the Iran-Contra affair and Bill Clinton reached out to Dick Morris, the political consultant, after the Democrats' whipping in the 1994 mid-term elections.

It makes sense for a President to make these kinds of changes, if only because of burnout. "People are tired," says a former White House official. "Everyone is pooped at this point." But the changes by themselves are not a panacea. The sources of Bush's woes — mostly fueled by Iraq but also including high oil prices and stymied policies like the partial privatization of Social Security — aren't likely to change until the policies themselves either change or yield better results. The staff turnovers that lead to new policies tend to work best. Those that just change names don't. In the case of Reagan, the arrival of Washington fixer Kenneth Duberstein as chief of staff coincided with a push for arms control with Mikhail Gorbachev and new initiatives like welfare reform. In Carter's case, no policies really changed.

In that context, keeping Donald Rumsfeld makes sense for the President even if the calls for him to leave grow louder. Replacing Rumsfeld is unlikely to change the situation in Iraq or raise the President's popularity, because the President seems uninterested in a new approach to the three-year-old war. Little wonder that on Tuesday, the President reasserted his support for the embattled secretary, telling reporters, "I hear the voices, and I read the front page, and I know the speculation. But I'm the decider, and I decide what is best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the Secretary of Defense." Of course, Bush also decided to give his unwavering support to Harriet Miers before she withdrew her Supreme Court nomination. The former White House official suggests that the formation of an Iraqi government might give Rumsfeld the cover to say that it's a good time to go. But Rumsfeld is likely to stay for the foreseeable future. And even if he were to leave, it's hard to see how cleaning him out would suddenly lift Bush's fortunes.