Bush leaning away from partisan picks

WASHINGTON - Running out of time, outnumbered in Congress and mired in a deeply unpopular war, President Bush did not need another fight. So he picked a consensus candidate for attorney general who has strong credentials in the antiterror effort and support from one of the most liberal senators.

It's rare for Bush and Sen. Chuck Schumer to agree on anything. But they found common ground when Schumer (D., N.Y.) suggested that retired federal judge Michael B. Mukasey replace the embattled Alberto R. Gonzales. The outcome showed how far Bush has come in reaching out to his congressional antagonists.

Mukasey's nomination follows a second-term pattern for Bush that is becoming more pronounced: nominating seasoned individuals who command wide bipartisan respect, often to replace highly partisan, and divisive officeholders.

That includes Robert Gates, who succeeded Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon; Wall Street veteran Henry Paulson as Treasury secretary, following John Snow; and Robert Zoellick at the World Bank, replacing Paul Wolfowitz, one of the original architects of the Iraq war.

Stephen Wayne, a political scientist at Georgetown University, said: "In his first term, there were three criteria: loyalty, loyalty and loyalty. The fourth, which occasionally came in, was competence. At this point, I think he wants people who will basically support his administration and have decent credentials."

In waging the Iraq war, Bush has also stepped back somewhat and let Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, become the primary spokesman for the administration's military buildup. Petraeus is well respected by both Republicans and Democrats.

Mukasey, 66, who was born in the Bronx, N.Y., has a reputation as a legal conservative, particularly on national-security issues, but is also seen as generally acceptable to Democrats, who saw in him an independent streak.

For instance, Mukasey partially ruled against the administration in the case of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen with alleged ties to al-Qaeda who was recently convicted on terrorism charges. Mukasey's ruling overturned the administration's attempts to block Padilla from being able to meet with his lawyers.

Mukasey was appointed to the federal bench in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan. He was chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York before retiring last September to return to private practice.

Schumer's ringing endorsement - he also suggested Mukasey as a possible Supreme Court nominee in 2003 - would normally be a kiss of death to the party's right wing. And the White House spent considerable energy in trying to ease concerns of its GOP base and to emphasize that Mukasey was conservative enough and could be a strong defender of the administration's legal assertions on national security.

The Republican National Committee even distributed an editorial by William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, praising Mukasey as "one of the country's top trial judges" and saying that "he can't be caricatured as a partisan apologist, and the Democrats won't be able to lay a glove on him."

Bush's nomination came after Senate Democrats last week made clear they would block a vote on a former solicitor general, Ted Olson, whom many conservatives championed for the post.

"I am glad President Bush listened to Congress and put aside his plan to replace Alberto Gonzales with another partisan administration insider," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) said.

Carl Tobias, a constitutional law professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia, said that after months of sparring with Congress, "the president seemed to want a consensus nominee."

Nominating someone like Olson would just have reopened battles over Bush's wireless surveillance program and the U.S. attorney firings, Tobias said. "Maybe the administration is less willing to have fights that just delay the entire process of getting someone in there," he said.

Although Mukasey had been vetted by White House counsel Fred Fielding and Bush chief of staff Joshua Bolten, Bush had not met him before a one-on-one meeting at the White House on Sept. 1.

That the White House picked Mukasey "shows the degree to which they worked seriously at finding somebody like him," said Stephen Hess, a presidential scholar at the Brookings Institution, "and that there was somebody like that out there."