A Cabinet Setback for Bush
WASHINGTON — The abrupt withdrawal of the White House's choice to head the Homeland Security Department is an embarrassing setback for President Bush's effort to put his second-term Cabinet in place quickly and without controversy.
One day after acknowledging that a woman who was a domestic employee as recently as two weeks ago may have been an illegal immigrant, former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik accepted blame for failing to unearth the problem and tell the White House before he was nominated to be secretary of Homeland Security.
"This is my responsibility," Kerik told reporters in front of his New Jersey home Saturday morning, just a few hours after his withdrawal was announced late Friday night. "It was my mistake. It wasn't a mistake made by the White House."
Kerik's withdrawal forces the White House to find someone else to fill one of the most important jobs in the Cabinet for Bush, who has made fighting terrorism his No. 1 priority.
Even before Kerik's nanny troubles surfaced, Democratic opponents and news organizations were mining his colorful and controversial record for evidence of possible conflicts of interest and other questions about his ethics.
Some analysts said that Bush had been in such a hurry to complete his Cabinet -- and to name a hero of the Sept. 11 attacks and protege of former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani to a leading role -- that the White House did not catch obvious problems in Kerik's background.
"The president violated every rule that guides the nominating process: Don't announce until you vet," said Paul Light, an analyst at the Brookings Institution who has studied the presidential appointment process. "They announced well before Kerik had filled out the most basic of paperwork."
As a blunt-speaking outsider, Kerik broke the pattern set by Bush in filling other top Cabinet posts with longtime associates and loyal aides. But there was much in Kerik for Bush to like. He earned his stripes as police chief on the day New York suffered its traumatic terrorist attack. He was a favorite of Giuliani, who was a popular and active campaigner for Bush's reelection in 2004. New York's two liberal Democratic senators, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles E. Schumer, supported his nomination. And he had the kind of hard-knock life story that appeals to Bush.
White House spokeswoman Clare Buchan denied that the administration was any more lax in screening Kerik's background than it was with any other nominee.
