FREQUENT FLYER
Word out of the House Democrat leadership is that Speaker of the
House Nancy Pelosi is not only having her staff
make plans for a trip to Venezuela to meet there with dictator
Hugo Chavez, she has also asked staff to apply for
a visa to travel to Tehran.
“She is getting bad advice from people back home in San
Francisco,” says a leadership aide, who is working for one Pelosi’s
colleagues. “She is not getting it from members of her leadership
team. That’s all anyone here is willing to say.”
IRREPLACEABLE
The White House was considering a replacement for Attorney General
Alberto Gonzales earlier this month. The two most
common names mentioned: Texas Sen. John Cornyn and
current Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Chris
Cox. But after some initial internal discussion, according
to White House insiders, plans to dump Gonzales were dropped.
Why?
“Even if we’d nominated someone like Cornyn, it wasn’t clear
that we had the strategy or the chits to call in to get him
confirmed in a timely manner,” says a White House insider with
knowledge of the discussions. “And Cox has been a disappointment at
the SEC. He’s shown too much of willingness to work with the
Democratic members of the commission.”
Given the White House’s penchant for trying to do just that in
inopportune moments, one would think that Cox’s approach would have
made him the No. 1 candidate.
As it stands, look for a cleaning of the house in lower ranks of
Justice Department’s political appointees, with Gonzales staying on
for a period.
IMAGE DEFLATORS
On Saturday, a “Draft Fred Thompson” rally was
held in the small, out of the way town of Cookeville, Tennessee.
The media is reporting attendance for the get-together at 300.
But the petition that attendees signed had more than 500 names
attached.
The media pulled a similar shrinking job on the meeting that
Thompson held on Capitol Hill earlier this month with Republican
members of Congress. Then, it reported numbers between 35 to 40,
when the number was closer to 60.
If there is one downside to Thompson’s process to entering the
presidential race, it is that he has limited opportunity to set the
record straight on the inaccuracies being generated by the media
and the left, if not other GOP presidential campaigns.
For example, the New Republic recently reported that
Thompson was a “phony populist” for driving a red truck around the
state during his ‘94 Senate campaign. But it failed to report that
he took to driving the truck after his own campaign managers had
attempted to package him as a straight, conventional GOP
candidate.
“The truck wasn’t about changing his image, it was about his
getting back to who he really was,” says a source who worked for
Thompson back in ‘94. “It wasn’t spin, just Fred wanting to be
Fred.”
