New York Times Editorial - This is a shake-up?

This is a shake-up?

Copyright by The New York Times

THURSDAY, MARCH 30, 2006

For months now, people have been urging President George W. Bush to shake up his inner circle and bring in fresh air. Perhaps in response, the White House chief of staff, Andrew Card Jr., resigned Tuesday. Bush opened the window - and in climbed his budget director, Joshua Bolten, who used to be Card's deputy.

If this is what passes for a shake-up in this administration, the next two and a half years are going to be grim indeed. This is a meaningless change, and it simply sends the message that Bush lacks the gumption to trade in anyone in the comforting, friendly cast of characters who have kept him cocooned since his first inauguration.

It's hard to figure out what unmet need this change is supposed to fill. There's been a lot of talk about how exhausted the original Bush team is. But Bolten ought to be as pooped as everybody else. It takes just as much energy to put together an out-of- whack, fiscally ruinous budget as it does to mess up an invasion or ignore a cataclysmic hurricane.

Bolten has been giving the president advice for years, and the result has been a deficit estimated at $371 billion. Perhaps he'll come up with a better approach in his new job. We've heard that under Card's watch, aides wound up showing Bush videos of TV coverage of Hurricane Katrina to convince their boss that it really was a problem. Maybe Bolten can start the next budget discussion with some audiovisual aids - like an abacus.