Congress Watch: For Frist, a pile of Bush burdens
The second failed cloture vote on John Bolton in two weeks underscored that things are not going as planned for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and some people are beginning to blame the White House for his troubles.
It is hard to schedule a vote you know you're going to lose, but there seems to be no chance that President Bush will pull the troubled Bolton nomination. Frist has been carrying the White House's water, which has turned into a burdensome task. Not enough Republican senators have warmed to Bolton to make his case a cause celebre, and that leaves Frist fighting a losing battle. But he not only has been forced to champion Bolton, whom one Republican aide described as having the "people skills of Robert Downey, Jr.," but has spent much of this Congress trying to get his colleagues to confirm judges who had been rejected in the last Congress. That is improbably difficult work for the most skilled and experienced of leaders. For Frist, who served no apprenticeship for the job, the task has been almost impossible. The two-term senator is clearly thinking about running for president in 2008, and at times it seems he is the nearest thing to an heir apparent to Bush as exists in the GOP.
It was the White House that picked him to replace Trent Lott in 2002, after Lott was accused of romanticizing segregation. The idea then was that Frist would be the new, post-modern, ubercompetent face of the Republican Party. He was a superstar heart transplant surgeon from Tennessee—not some alleged political hack from Mississippi. But the White House has made life very difficult by sending him Bolton and once-rejected judges. And it's not going to get any easier when he gets to embryonic-stem-cell research or a Supreme Court nomination. Some of Frist's boosters are asking: With friends like these, who needs Democrats?
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