NYDailyNews

W Stands for 'Women' They have top jobs with Bush

By THOMAS M. DeFRANK Daily News Washington Bureau Chief

WASHINGTON President Bush has more women in the White House than his predecessor — and that's not a Letterman joke.

When Bush's senior staff assembles each morning, eight of the 18 participants are women. Karen Hughes, Bush's counselor and closest personal aide, is by far the most influential woman at the White House since Hillary Rodham Clinton. Condoleezza Rice is the first female national security adviser, and four cabinet secretaries are women.

Three of the Big Four cabinet departments — Defense, Justice and Treasury — have spokeswomen, not spokesmen. And when Bush finishes his staffing assignments, aides believe 25% to 30% of the senior positions will go to women.

That's not by accident. As governor of Texas, Bush pushed his staffers hard to find more women for top state jobs, and aides say his desire for gender diversity as President is savvy politics as well as a personal philosophy.

Some Bush officials involved in the selection process say there's such insistence on hiring distaff staffers that there's an informal quota system at work — something Bush has opposed throughout his political career and an allegation senior aides vigorously dispute.

"He hasn't singled out women with me," said Clay Johnson, chief of presidential personnel and a longtime Bush friend. "But he talks all the time about diversity. He thinks about it not as a politically good thing to do, but as a way to avoid a similarity of thought in the people around him. He likes a good exchange of ideas."

Even so, some senior officials involved in the sub-cabinet selection process say they've been pointedly told by the White House that at least 30% of their senior appointees — and preferably 40% — should be women.

In Texas, 35% of Bush's appointments were women.

Johnson flatly denied there's a quota system.

"I've never been given a mandatory anything by him," Johnson said of Bush. "There are no targets."

Yet there's no doubt that drafting women is a top priority at the Bush White House.

"We've all gotten calls that begin, 'Who would be a good woman for SEC chairman?'" a prominent Republican official said, adding that Bush personnel officers have been urged to have women on every "short list" for senior jobs.

Predictably, some white guys are grousing. One cabinet officer has complained to friends that the White House has forced him to accept women for positions he considered unqualified.

Similarly, despite strong support from Republican senators, the well-respected spokesman for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee lost out to a woman for the job of National Security Council press officer. And White House political aides decreed that one of the deputy press secretary slots must go to a woman.

"There are several instances where being female broke the tie," a senior Bush adviser shrugged.

Bush always has emphasized recruiting more women in high places, but there's also obvious political value to his female-friendly hiring practices. He did better with female voters in the presidential campaign than Bob Dole did in 1996, but aides privately conceded he'll have to attract more women in 2004 to win a second term.

"If we want to become the majority party in America," a Bush political adviser bluntly noted, "we have to get rid of our gender gap."

That's partly why Bush's prime domestic priority is education — an issue that appeals to female voters — and helps explain why it's "ladies first" as often as possible in his government.

With Helen Kennedy

Original Publication Date: 3/25/01

-- Anonymous, March 25, 2001