Dole quit in part because his evident mastery of its rules left the impression that he cared more about recondite parliamentary tactics than he did about the presidency. Frist, who many speculate plans a bid in 2008, has the opposite problem. The longer he tries to run the Senate, the more he looks like a bungler whose only principle is personal advancement.
Of course, Frist may look like a bungler because he is a bungler. I won’t ascribe to the Senator that his only principle is personal advancement. I wish it were, as it may have made him tougher in dealing with the seven members of his own party who brokered the deal with the Democrats to theoretically kill the filibuster of the President’s judicial nominees. The deal may have also ended the possibility of two or four of the nominees of getting confirmed, and has certainly done long term damage to any White House aspirations of Senator Frist.
The Bolton nomination fiasco only adds to the image of impotence in the Senate Republican leadership and should cause “the Coalition of the Chillin’ ” a slight thaw.
(I’m not ready to join the “Not One Dime” coalition either, so just put me in the “Pessimists Impatiently Hoping to be Proven Wrong”. Unfortunately, we’ll have lame t-shirts.)
If Senator Frist does still harbor White House ambitions after the events of this last week, he needs to move quickly to push the other judicial nominees through and the Bolton nomination through. Failure to hold his party together to support the President’s nominees is inexcusable.
Meanwhile, spell check or an editor killed an obvious one-liner in the LA Times. How could they have missed writing the last line, “…he would do well to remember that the Hippocratic oath should apply to the Senate as well: Frist do no harm.”
