O, CHRISTMAS TREE
In less than a week the White House has completed the first draft
of the legislation that will create the Department of Homeland
Security, and White House insiders predict that the final piece of
legislation will be sent to Capitol Hill within the next two weeks.
“We’re gonna make this in record time because we’ve been working on
it really since September 14,” says a White House policy staffer
involved in the work.
The one concern the White House has is the pork and additional
appropriations the Senate may attempt to tack on to the bill. Two
previous appropriations bills put forward by the White House
related to September 11 were passed virtually intact by the House,
with little or no so-called “Christmas treeing” of additional pork
projects. The Senate, on the other hand, attached close to $8
billion in additional spending above what the White House had
requested. “We’ve met with both Republicans and Democrats privately
on this issue, and they’ve assured us they will expedite this
legislation and won’t bog us down with more money than we’ve asked
for,” says the policy staffer. “As it is, $38 billion is a lot to
play with.”
THIS WEAK
With ABC’s “This Week” set to become a one-man show run by former
Clinton senior adviser George Stephanopoulos, the
White House is using the summer to figure out its media plan for
the fall push for regaining the Senate, holding the House, and
advancing its agenda.
“As far as we can tell, there are only two shows where our
message will be allowed to get out clearly, and that’s at CNN with
Wolf Blitzer and on NBC with Tim Russert,” says a
White House communications staffer. “But we can’t just boycott
‘This Week’ the way we’ve been boycotting ‘Crossfire’ on CNN.
Stephanopoulos is going to get some decent ratings, and it’s a show
we have to work with.”
The White House is leaning toward offering “This Week” what the
show likes to call “second tier talent” (no Colin
Powell, no Donald Rumsfeld, no
Condi Rice), to gauge just how aggressive
Stephanopoulos will be with guests in the opening months of his new
hosting duties. “The expectation is he’s going to be pretty tough,
that he’s going to want to show his bosses he can be just as
aggressive as Russert,” says the White House source. “But if he
plays nice, we’ll give him our headliners.”
But ABC and Stephanopoulos aren’t expecting too cold a shoulder.
“No matter what they may say, we’re at the least the second-best
show in town,” says an ABC News producer in Washington, in a nice
tip of the hat to Russert’s “Meet the Press.” “If the White House
wants its message out, it’s going to have to play ball with us.
George is going to get good ratings, he’s going to be popular. This
show is going to get fixed. The White House better not try to hard
to dictate terms. You never can tell when the tide will turn.”
BURKE TEAMWORK
Former Bob Dole chief of staff and key adviser
Sheila Burke hasn’t wasted a lot of time ensuring
that her reputation as a liberal Republican Democratic sympathizer
remains intact. Burke, who left Washington after Dole’s defeat in
1996, returned to the nation’s capital last year after Republicans
regained control of the executive branch bureaucracy to become a
director of the Smithsonian Institution — where she continues to
help Democrats.
Recently Burke hired Evelyn Lieberman as
Smithsonian director of communications and public affairs. This is
the same Lieberman who played a memorable role in the
Monica Lewinsky affair. As deputy chief of staff
to Bill Clinton, Lieberman grew alarmed at the
seeming close relationship between the intern and the president.
Her solution was to move Lewinsky from the White House to the
Pentagon, where Ms. Monica teamed up with an obscure staffer named
Linda Tripp.
