Scripps Howard News Service August 11, 2004
CIA nominee's hearings will have election-year twist
By Joel Eskovitz
WASHINGTON - Rep. Porter Goss, the heir-apparent to an agency in turmoil, spent his second straight morning bathed in the camera lights. President Bush's nominee to head the CIA was able to escape the glare.
But the Florida Republican will soon find himself at the center of a dramatic confirmation process that will be as much a campaign event as an analysis of intelligence reform in light of embarrassing lapses before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the war in Iraq.
Senate Democrats are keenly aware of the risk of looking like obstructionists in the war on terror if they try too hard to stall Goss' nomination before the Nov. 2 election.
They have already backed away from earlier partisan critiques of the candidate and instead laid out their chief goal of the nomination process: to highlight intelligence failures that occurred during Bush's presidency and chastise him for not endorsing all 41 reforms recommended by the bipartisan 9/11 Commission.
If that argument resonates with voters watching the hearings planned for the first week in September, expect a protracted nomination process for Goss and a politically devastating result for the incumbent president, said John Pike, a security analyst who has tracked the intelligence community for 25 years. But if polls show the American people believe the Democrats' claims are nothing but political gamesmanship, he said, party leaders will quickly move to confirm the former intelligence officer.
"It's just like any other TV show," said Pike, director of the nonpartisan GlobalSecurity.org. "Everybody's going to be looking to see what the ratings are."
On Wednesday, Goss announced he would be temporarily stepping down from his post as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee pending the completion of the nomination process. A majority of the 17-member Senate Intelligence Committee and a majority of senators would be needed to confirm Goss.
The Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said he would schedule hearings for the first week in September after members return from summer recess. The leading Democrat on the committee, Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, has already laid out a blueprint of the proceedings.
"Porter Goss will need to answer tough questions about his record and his position on reform, including questions on the independence of the leader of the intelligence community," Rockefeller said.
The key issue for Democrats will be the creation of a new national intelligence director to oversee the intelligence community, a recommendation made by the 9/11 Commission. While Bush supports the idea, he has differed with the panel's request to grant that person authority over budgetary and personnel decisions.
If Goss concurs with Bush's position, his confirmation hearings "could get rather raucous," said Florida Sen. Bill Nelson. Still, the Democrat conceded that even if Goss did not believe the new position should hold such power, he would nonetheless vote for Goss' confirmation.
The Bush administration recognized that political pickle when it announced Goss's selection in a Tuesday morning Rose Garden ceremony.
The move is straight out of the GOP's 2002 playbook, when Republicans used the Democrats' opposition to creating the Department of Homeland Security on bureaucratic grounds regarding employee pay to paint the party as soft on terrorism. The result: Bush became the third president in U.S. history to watch his party gain seats in Congress during midterm elections.
Still, a political move carries a political backlash. By nominating Goss - whose strident remarks in the past year have overshadowed the bipartisan image he crafted during his first 15 years in Congress - the White House has come under fire for politicizing a job that requires objectivity above all else.
But those critiques have largely been targeted toward Bush, not Goss, who still earns respect from his peers. Unlike other contentious confirmation hearings, unearthing skeletons in the nominee's closet is unlikely to be part of the Democrats' strategy, especially because Goss spent a decade as a CIA agent.
In the end, Democrats also realize the obvious: If Sen. John Kerry wins in November, he would likely replace Goss with his own selection, creating a bit of political irony. The last time a Democratic president refused to keep his predecessor's CIA director was 1977, when President Carter sent President Ford's intelligence chief packing.
Not coincidentally, that man was also the last congressman to be named CIA director: George H. W. Bush.
© Copyright 2004, Scripps Howard News Service
