Rice’s Testimony May Be Audition

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.

Rice has been a focus of controversy since her former counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, accused her of failing to focus on the threat posed by Al Qaeda. But around water coolers and at dinner parties in Washington, much of the gossip isn’t about life-and-death matters of national security policy; it’s about who gets what foreign policy job a year from now.

“It happens in the fourth year of every presidency,” said Paul C. Light, a professor at New York University who monitors the presidential appointments process -- the top end of the federal personnel system. “I expect half of the Cabinet to leave.... And that will open up a lot of important jobs.”

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.

Bush isn’t saying what his second-term intentions are -- neither are Rice, Powell or Rumsfeld. But that doesn’t stop the speculation.

“The scuttlebutt ... [is that] Powell will leave quickly, Rumsfeld will leave later,” said David Gergen, a former aide to presidents of both parties. He added that he had no inside information on the matter -- an admission that qualifies in Washington as saintly humility.

As for Rice’s chances of advancement, Gergen said: “Has she lost a little of her luster? Yes. Would she be confirmed in a second term? Absolutely.... There’s a good chance the critics will see her [at this week’s hearing] and think she’d make a good secretary of State.”

But others say Rice doesn’t really want to be secretary of State -- that she’d rather be secretary of Defense. National Journal, a weekly magazine of government affairs, recently quoted a former Rice aide, Anna Perez, as saying she thought her old boss would prefer the Pentagon job. (“I don’t remember ever saying that,” Perez said last week.)

Another longtime Rice friend, Coit D. Blacker, director of Stanford University’s Institute for International Studies, said he thought Rice wanted to return to her old job as a professor there. But he added: “What happens if Bush is reelected and asks her to do something? It’s tough to know.”

In any case, Riceologists said, she is unlikely to want to spend another four years as national security advisor. “Condi ... has always had a fetish for not staying too long in the same place,” said former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft, who hired her for her first White House job in 1989 under President George H.W. Bush, the current president’s father. (She stayed in that job for two years, despite Scowcroft’s efforts to persuade her to stay longer.)

If Rice leaves her current post, she has two deputies considered more than willing to move up: Stephen Hadley, the National Security Council’s No. 2 and a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, and Robert D. Blackwill, the NSC’s coordinator for Iraq policy.

At the State Department, even officials who describe themselves as loyalists say they expect Powell and his sometimes-pugnacious deputy, Richard L. Armitage, to leave their jobs at the end of this term. Powell shrugs off inquiries about his own future, saying only: “I serve at the pleasure of the president.”

As for Rumsfeld, Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita said: “He hasn’t given a lot of thought to it. It’s the president’s decision, not his.” But others noted that the Defense secretary recently bought a weekend home near the Chesapeake Bay about an hour from Washington -- a move taken by many as a sign that he expects to stick around.

“He’ll do whatever the president wants him to do -- but if it was a matter of personal preference for Rumsfeld, I think he’d stay at the Pentagon,” a former Rumsfeld aide said. “He’s trying to make big changes in the institution, and he knows, as a former CEO, that it takes years to do that. You can get phenomenal things done in the fifth year of a presidency.”

And if Rumsfeld stays, his deputy, Wolfowitz, is likely to stay as well. “I’d be surprised if Rumsfeld wanted a change there,” a Pentagon official said.

Another job likely to open up is at the CIA, where officials say Director George J. Tenet has made no secret of his interest in retiring. One candidate as his successor might be Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), a former CIA officer.

Would any of those changes mean a major shift in the tenor of Bush administration foreign policy?

Probably not, Bush-watchers say. If Rice or Bremer becomes secretary of State, there might be less tension between the White House and the State Department; both Rice and Bremer are said to be more hawkish than Powell. But that is likely to be a difference of nuance, especially in an administration where one other powerful foreign policy figure -- Cheney -- is likely to remain.

“Don’t expect the center of gravity to move,” Gergen said. “It will still be in right-of-center, neoconservative territory.”

More important, perhaps, will be a problem that afflicts presidents of both parties who win a second term: the challenge of maintaining focus and momentum behind an agenda that is already four years old.

“Second terms are notoriously frustrating,” Light said. “You have one year, maybe, to get things done before the campaign begins for the next election.... Over the last 20 years, there has been a dramatic decline in the quality of what presidents can get done in their second terms.

“And you have increasing difficulty hanging on to people” in top jobs, he added. “It’s like pulling the plug at the bottom of a big water tower: Everything flows out. You have vacancy after vacancy.”

Why? “First, they just get tired. Second, some of them will leave to make money lobbying. And some of them leave to run for office.... There are diminishing returns for service in a second term. It’s just not as interesting a place to be. People who are motivated by the chance to do something worthwhile see less of a chance to do that.”

And, over time, that means some of the people who serve in a president’s second term are different from those who served in the first.

“People in the first term are more motivated by policy goals, the chance to serve an admired president, the opportunity to effect policy change,” he said. “In the second term, you get more people coming in because it’s an opportunity to network and make contacts. You get an increase in the number of people motivated by me-ism, ticket-punching.”

Times staff writer Maura Reynolds in Washington contributed to this report.