WP: D.C. "buzz" re. Bush II Cabinet (Secy. of Defense Condi?) [View All]

[DeepModem Mom]

Rice's Testimony May Be Audition
A strong showing before the Sept. 11 panel could land her a Cabinet post in a second Bush term.

By Doyle McManus, Times Staff Writer


WASHINGTON — When Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security advisor, testifies this week before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, much of Washington will be watching raptly — not just to hear what she says, but to see whether she blows her chance of getting a Cabinet post if Bush is reelected....

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If Bush wins a second term, officials say they expect him to ask Rice to stay — but Rice's friends say she has long expressed a desire to move, either back to California or into a different job. The betting in Washington is that she may be nominated as the next secretary of State or Defense.

That assumes that the current occupants of those jobs, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, move out — two assumptions that, in Washington's mysterious ways, are becoming the conventional wisdom, correct or not.

That's not all. If Rice isn't the next secretary of State, the buzz goes, the most likely candidate may be L. Paul Bremer III, head of the U.S. occupation authority in Iraq. If Rice isn't the next secretary of Defense, Tom Ridge, the secretary of Homeland Security, might like the job. And nobody's sure what happens to the controversial deputy secretary of Defense, Paul D. Wolfowitz....


http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-bushteam5apr05,1,3098955.story?coll=la-home-headlines