Not the NYPD or Muslim students. (flickr/fortherock)

The N.Y.P.D.'s monitoring of Muslim students not only extended far beyond New York, the department even sent an intrepid undercover operative on a whitewater rafting trip just to gather intelligence. The Associated Press reports the N.Y.P.D. tracked and monitored Muslim students at various universities, including Yale. The intelligence efforts also extended to the Web:

Detectives trawled Muslim student websites every day and, although professors and students hadn't been accused of wrongdoing, their names were recorded in reports prepared for Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.

N.Y.P.D. spokesman Paul Browne explained the measures by pointing out to the A.P. that at least 12 people who have been picked up on terrorism charges were at one time in Muslim student associations. It was unclear how many were also whitewater rafting devotees.

[CBS News/AP]

“I think you saw in the 90’s a sort of never-ending investigation of Bill Clinton, and it created a widespread national consensus in support of Bill Clinton, and people who were bringing these charges get tossed out of power,” said Democratic consultant Jonathan Rosen, who was recently hired by the state Democratic Party.

Roger Stone, the former CREEP operative who currently works for the Senate Republicans, seemed amused at the analogy. “We also tried to say that Watergate was a third-rate burglary,” he said.

The great power of the dailies isn’t always used wisely, especially because “liberal” newspapers have so often proved easy prey for right-wing manipulation, as they were during the Clinton era and most of the Bush era.

Unfortunately, we can expect such manipulations to be repeated—as The New York Times illustrated on page 1 of its Feb. 19 edition, with an article headlined “As Clinton Runs, Some Old Foes Stay on Sideline.”

According to that report, the snarling perpetrators of what Hillary Clinton so famously called “this vast right-wing conspiracy” have been housebroken.

Christopher Ruddy, a journalist who now edits the extremely conservative Newsmax.com Web site, and who earned a certain reputation by insinuating that the Clintons were somehow responsible for the death of their friend and counsel, Vince Foster, told the paper that both he and his patron, Richard Mellon Scaife, have since “had a rethinking” about Hillary and Bill.

“Clinton wasn’t such a bad president,” said Mr. Ruddy. “In fact, he was a pretty good president in a lot of ways, and Dick [Scaife] feels that way today.” Although the Pittsburgh billionaire didn’t comment directly, Mr. Ruddy went on to compliment Senator Clinton for moderating her ideology and image.

Leave aside for a moment the patent insincerity of Mr. Ruddy’s remarks (obvious to anyone who examines his furiously Clinton-bashing Newsmax Web site). More plausible and yet more astonishing was this line: “Mr. Scaife, reclusive heir to the Mellon banking fortune, spent more than $2 million investigating and publicizing accusations about the supposed involvement of Mrs. Clinton and former President Bill Clinton in corrupt land deals, sexual affairs, drug running and murder.”

Certainly Mr. Scaife spent millions to portray the Clintons as crooks and worse. Indeed, he invested $2.4 million in the so-called Arkansas Project, a clandestine effort to ruin the reputations of President and Mrs. Clinton and anyone associated with them—and spent considerably more to subsidize Mr. Ruddy as well as others with the same agenda. And certainly Mr. Scaife publicized the “supposed involvement” of the Clintons in “corrupt land deals.”

But so did The Times, which more than any other news organization bears responsibility for the phony Whitewater scandal and the runaway independent-counsel probe that led to President Clinton’s impeachment. And now, on its front page, in a single sentence, the paper of record effectively disowned hundreds and perhaps thousands of articles, editorials and columns that once framed the trivial, unprofitable and long-dead Whitewater investment as a matter of immediate public concern.

In The Times, their guilty involvement was treated as something established, not “supposed.” Eight years and tens of millions of dollars later, the independent counsel grudgingly conceded that its investigators and lawyers had found no criminal wrongdoing in Whitewater by the Clintons. That was the same conclusion reached years earlier in a truly nonpartisan investigation undertaken by the Resolution Trust Corporation (to which The Times gave scant attention).

With the assistance of The Times’ editors, not to mention their equally zealous counterparts at The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, the right-wing network financed by Mr. Scaife succeeded in crippling the Clinton White House for years and nearly bringing it down altogether.

Only when impeachment loomed did The Times nervously back away from the consequences of its stupid crusade. To this day, the paper’s editors have never admitted that they were wrong about Whitewater. They have confessed serious error on many things, from the Wen Ho Lee affair to the hyping of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, but Whitewater remains a sacred cow.

All this ancient history matters now because, like everyone else, America’s newspaper editors are prone to repeat the errors they forget. To read Newsmax.com, where former Clinton consultant Dick Morris holds forth incessantly on the grave peril posed by Hillary, is to understand that the right will attack her as vigorously as ever should she win the Democratic nomination next year. Already, Mr. Morris and assorted other characters from the old Clinton drama are preparing films and books to re-enact their vendetta, and Mr. Scaife and Mr. Ruddy can be relied upon to promote those efforts, as they have consistently done for the past several years. No doubt the “Swiftboaters” who so scurrilously and profitably smeared Senator John Kerry’s war record in 2004 will join the fun.

The question is whether America’s leading newspapers can overcome their aversion to being labeled liberal and expose smears from either side of the spectrum without amplifying them. With Senator Clinton leading the polls, an honest reassessment of mainstream journalism during the Clinton years is overdue.

As I write, the votes for the midterm election haven’t been counted, but whatever the results, we are going to be staring in the face of maybe two straight years of 24/7 talk about Hillary Clinton, her virtues and vices, a woman President and what that will mean, yada, yada, yada, ad infinitum.

Can you bear it? Are we going to learn anything new from it? Is there any aspect of it that hasn’t been beaten to death with discussion and debate already? Isn’t there some way we can just get it over with, just give way to the unstoppable force of nature that is the junior Senator from New York?

Hasn’t she paid her dues, done her job, demonstrated a kind of solidity and poise in the face of relentless, nonstop microscopic scrutiny with barely a misstep? Hasn’t she suffered enough for her husband’s sins? Hasn’t she shown something we couldn’t be sure of when she was in the shadow of her husband: an ability to grow, to learn? Hasn’t she—no small task—become that complex cosmopolitan creature, a true New Yorker?

Yes, I’ve had problems with her in the past; I have some problems with her now. I’ve criticized her support for capital punishment, her refusal to support same-sex marriage rights (a position she seems to be edging away from since my column on the subject: “Gay Marriage Is Love; Why Are Chuck, Hillary Skittish on the Topic?”, The Observer, July 24, 2006; do I get credit?).

But isn’t it true that so many of what others see as her vices may turn out to be attributes as President? She’s “Machiavellian,” people say. But doesn’t a superpower need an effectively Machiavellian leader? “Machiavellian” doesn’t necessarily mean “unprincipled.” There’s a longstanding academic debate on the question of Machiavelli’s attitude toward principle: Was he advocating “Machiavellian” methods in the service of Enlightenment principle, and thus more of a pragmatic idealist than he’s given credit for? I think “Machiavellian” can mean “effectively principled.” There can be an idealistic Machiavellian: someone who knows how to get the right things done. I wish we lived in a world where good things happened by waving fairy dust at a problem and saying all the right things, but sometimes it takes more than that.

And what about global politics? It seems to me that any future international politics will be dominated by the clash of theocratic and Enlightenment values in one form or another, and a woman would be especially attuned to the need to resist the kind of woman-hating, woman-fearing theocratic movements that want to take back all the freedoms women have won in the past century. I think she knows this in a profound way that should give the woman-haters something real to fear.

“Well, what about the past—what about the health-care disaster?” you say. The point of that, I’d argue in retrospect, is that she was absolutely right about the disastrous American health-insurance system, but she didn’t know how to address it effectively, as a policy matter, as a political matter. She wasn’t Machiavellian enough at that point. But one thing one feels from observing her is that she doesn’t make the same mistake twice. Give her another shot at it.

What about “character,” what about the fuss that Hillary-haters make about the “missing” Whitewater billing records, for instance? The ones that went missing, then mysteriously showed up at a time more opportune for her. You really want to discuss them? Ken Starr couldn’t pin anything on her for them. O.K., I’m down, but first let me explain the genesis of my sudden “Hillary for President” conversion.

My Hillary Conversion

When I say “conversion,” I mean precisely that; it was a genuinely radical readjustment of my previous attitude. I came to realize that I had become imprisoned by calcified cynicism about Hillary. An inability to see beyond the conventional wise-guy attitude toward her that reduces everything about her to calculation and ambition and ignores an element of idealism that I think is real, however Machiavellian its means.

To shake off the shackles of conventional wisdom about Hillary requires several weeks of mind-control programming in a re-education camp (kidding!). Seriously, though, it requires one to be receptive to rethinking, re-evaluation, to be ready to be shaken up a bit out of old attitudes. For me, it required a trip to L.A. to acquire a new attitude toward our New York Senator.

Let me briefly recount my conversion narrative. I was in L.A. for my book tour (for The Shakespeare Wars), finding myself in an uncharacteristically good mood. The night before, I’d done a reading at one of my fave bookstores, Book Soup on Sunset. I was having a lunch in one of my favorite eating places there, Kate Mantilini on Wilshire, meeting with an interesting fellow, Rod Lurie, a former magazine writer who’d become a highly successful Hollywood writer/producer/director. Mr. Lurie had written and directed The Contender, a smart movie about a woman nominated for the Vice Presidency who faced down a Clintonian sex scandal; he’d gone on to create Commander in Chief, the short-lived TV hit in which Geena Davis played the first woman President (and was seen by many as an explicit advertisement for a Hillary candidacy, although I don’t think that’s necessarily the case).

He’d asked to meet to discuss a magazine story I’d done, but I was fascinated by his story. A West Point graduate, a boxing, sports-betting, Vegas-loving guy, he’d managed to use his skills in the service of movie and TV product that, I believe, measurably shifted the consciousness of the culture toward acceptance of a woman President. Gotta give Mr. Lurie props for that.

It’s something we all think is not impossible, even something that will almost certainly come to pass one day. We all take it for granted in theory, but it has yet to happen; making it real would be a major civil-rights victory. Yes, the “right” has already been “won,” but until it has become an accomplished fact, it’s really unwon (if not undone, in every sense of that word). It’s not about the theoretical right, but the actual job—and not for the perfect woman, but for someone who deserves the office as much as any male.

So, in a rare, expansive mood facilitated by the sublime corn chowder at Kate Mantilini, I was open to fresh thinking, and found myself prompted by Mr. Lurie’s dedication to the female-President cause to reassess Hillary. To abandon my knee-jerk cynicism about her. And to think that I should do my share to convince others to do so, too.

O.K., now let’s deal with the negatives, the “despites.” I’m not saying that I’m turning a blind eye to them.

I think it’s possible to favor Hillary despite her cattle-futures windfall (back when she was Arkansas’ First Lady, she made almost $100,000 in 10 months with money advanced on margin by a corporate Clinton supporter when, in fact, it’s not clear that her trading acumen—as opposed to special treatment for the wife of a governor—was responsible for the distribution of the windfall). No one was charged with a crime, but I think she’s too smart not to have known that something fishy was going on.

It’s a difficult question, but I feel that she must have learned a lesson from this. It’s not an excuse, but she must have realized something about the subtle ways that money can corrupt politics. It was a mistake—call it a moral failing. But let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Isn’t most campaign fund-raising a slightly less blatant form of that kind of cattle-futures-trading bribery?

And I think you can be for Hillary despite the Whitewater billing-records problem, although I admit the affair still mystifies me. But say we think the worst of what happened—I just don’t think it’s enough of a blot on her past, on her character, to disqualify her.

What about the other candidates, then? As someone who’s never voted for a Republican in his life, I’d like to find a Dem that I could feel enthusiastic about. I wrote a column endorsing John Kerry in 2004, but without much enthusiasm. I like John Edwards, but is he a winner? What it really comes down to is: What about Obama? And I don’t have any good answer for that. Either he or Hillary would represent a historic civil-rights breakthrough—and I don’t think that one precludes the other. One could succeed the other; one could run with the other. But if that’s your only objection, then join the movement to have everyone else but those two drop out. That means you, Joe Biden. That means you, Al Gore. That means you, John Kerry.

DESPITE MY NEWFOUND EVANGELICAL ENTHUSIASM for Hillary, I thought it worthwhile running my argument about a woman President—and Hillary specifically—past at least one woman. The one I chose, a smart journalist, didn’t much like the Hillary idea. She wasn’t arguing against a woman President; she was just unconvinced by the argument that some make: that we need a woman President regardless of the beliefs or character of the woman in question (i.e., the Liddy Dole problem).

She had another suggestion for a candidate, though. I’m not sure whether it was just a debating point, but it was a good one. What about Tammy Duckworth, she said, a woman she’d met and written about and had limitless admiration for.

Do you know about Tammy Duckworth, the Black Hawk helicopter pilot who had her legs blown off and her arm shattered in Iraq, but who survived and, in an incredible act of strength, character and courage, rehabbed herself (with the help of her husband) to the point where she was able to make a run for Congress as a Democrat in a traditionally Republican Illinois district—and where, as of this writing, the race is too close to call? No, Tammy Duckworth doesn’t have the usual executive-office experience. But look where the usual executive-office experience has gotten us.

O.K., I can see it. Both are stories of women who overcame wounds of a certain kind and might even have the strength to heal and inspire the nation. True, uniting people is—so far—not what Hillary is known for. It will be her last hurdle, and there will always be Hillary-haters that she’ll never convert. But she can win over the doubters; she’s won me over. Who knows? She’s shown herself capable of surprising us in so many other ways.

In any case, guys—you male Presidential candidates in both parties—it’s time to step aside this time.

"I have found Sen. Clinton to be very responsive to the needs of her constituents, whether it is with local governments or individuals.

"Her reputation for working on behalf of her constituents, with both Republicans and Democrats in Congress, is well known."

So Al gets to buck the Republican leadership and side with the winner, and Hillary gets a former Whitewater senator to sing her praises. Who loses?

- Tom McGeveran

Boston Globe, 1/25/96: "Sen. Alfonse D’Amato of New York introduced Weld..."

Boston Herald, 6/18/96: "Gov. William F. Weld, who has offered to be a "character witness" for first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, last night wined and dined the GOP’s Whitewater attack dog at a $ 1,000-a-head fund-raiser..."

(The canine in question being D’Amato.)

Weld’s spokeswoman, Andrea Tantaros, said the candidate recalls two other meetings, also in 1996.

They were together at a Suffolk County rally for Dole, she says, and at that year’s GOP convention, "They both walked into a room together where Dole was and a bunch of other people and someone said, ’Wow, look at this odd couple.’"

Tantaros has worked for House leadership and done an upstate congressional race, but it was back Lehigh University in 2000, that Tantaros -- then the student paper's conservative columnist -- exposed New York's junior Senator as a "power-hungry monster." Here's the parody-defying column, which dwells on the who-killed-Vince-Foster line, and more.

Some favorite excerpts:

....Yup, I guess Mrs. Clinton realizes that her time as first lady is coming to a close and this power-hungry monster feels she and her husband didn`t do enough damage to our country as a whole, so she needs to ruin New York.

Besides the fact that she isn't even from New York and has never even lived or been educated there, Mrs. Clinton is a power-hungry congenital liar....

'Hill' has been involved in multiple scandals (probably) more than all of the first ladies combined) and has lied probably about as many times as her husband has dropped his pants....

Oh, we can't forget the most famous, Whitewater. This was the Clinton's real-estate scam in Arkansas that ended up costing us taxpayers $69 million and White House Deputy Vincent Foster's life. (He was found dead in a nearby park in the heat of the scandal.)

But really, read the whole thing. It's a classic of a lost genre.

UPDATE: Tarantos emails: "Man I was angry. Either the Wawa was out of smokes or I had been woken up before noon when I wrote that." Anyway: "I make a better press secretary than I did journalist, that's for sure."

Now we live under a distorted facsimile of Republican conservatism with an attitude toward government that seems cynical and fundamentally nihilistic. This approach was summed up years ago by the right-wing commander and White House advisor Grover Norquist, when he explained his movement’s long-term objective: “My goal is to cut government in half in 25 years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

Before drowning it, however, he and his comrades will pick its pockets.

Led by George W. Bush, today’s conservatives have elevated political patronage from a universal and tolerable peccadillo to a public menace. So intent are they on providing lucrative, comfortable federal jobs to the members of their own gang that they have come to resemble the old clubhouse Democrats of Tammany Hall. (The difference is that Tammany, for all its corruption, provided employment and benefits to the poor, while the Bush White House reserves its patronage for the well-fed and well-heeled.) The result is incompetence slicked over with arrogance and inexperience guided by ideology.

Sharing the outlook of Mr. Norquist, the President has scarcely tried to find capable managers for the federal bureaucracy. He shares the radical right-wing objective of dismantling government institutions rather than managing them properly and effectively. At every level, he appoints loyal hacks who possess no relevant qualifications, so long as they share his anti-government ideology.

This is like putting the termites in charge of repairing the house.

The latest example is David Safavian, who suddenly resigned last week as the top procurement official at the White House Office of Management and Budget. On Sept. 19, he was arrested by F.B.I. agents for lying about his involvement with lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whom he helped to obtain control over federal properties in the District of Columbia and Maryland. He is a former lobbyist whose partners in the private sector have included both Mr. Abramoff and Mr. Norquist.

No doubt the indicted Mr. Safavian is, like his friends, a true believer in drowning government. He had little or no administrative experience, but he had the right friends and the right-wing ideology. And like Tammany’s immortal George Washington Plunkitt, he saw his opportunities and took ’em.

Where such wanton patronage becomes terribly perilous, as we have recently learned, is in making appointments to agencies that are supposed to protect the nation. Everyone knows about the strange rise and fall of Michael D. (Brownie) Brown at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But what of Michael Chertoff, the Secretary of Homeland Security, who may well be as much to blame as Mr. Brown for the fumbled federal response to Hurricane Katrina?

Reporting by Knight-Ridder News Service shows that Mr. Chertoff froze when he ought to have mobilized government during the crucial hours leading up to the disaster. Among the reasons for his failure is that he, too, lacked qualifications for his job. He is a highly capable lawyer, which may have caused him to dither over legalistic questions of state and federal authority, but he has few credentials to run an enormous and critically important bureaucracy. From the perspective of the Bush White House, the outstanding item on Mr. Chertoff’s résumé is his partisan hatchet work on the Senate Whitewater Committee.

The Homeland Security chief certainly isn’t the only member of the Whitewater alumni club to find gainful employment under Mr. Bush. From James Rogan, the former impeachment manager appointed to run the Patent Office after losing his House seat, to Brett Kavanaugh, the former associate independent counsel who serves as staff secretary to the President, many who joined the G.O.P. jihad against the Clintons have since suckled on the federal teat.

Only days ago, the President named Julie Myers, a 36-year-old Republican attorney, to head the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency within Homeland Security. She used to be Mr. Chertoff’s chief of staff, and she also used to work for Kenneth Starr, but she has no discernible background that would enable her to oversee a law-enforcement agency with 20,000 employees and a $4 billion budget.

“I will seek to work with those who are more knowledgeable in this area, who know more than I do,” she said when asked how she expected to do her new job if confirmed by the Senate. Surely she meant to sound reassuring—but in an age of terror, why wouldn’t the President appoint someone “more knowledgeable” and more experienced to oversee our borders and ports?

While New York's senior Senator, Charles Schumer, took just seven minutes to issue a giddy paean to Mr. Chertoff, Mrs. Clinton waited until midday to issue a decidedly cool, neutral statement. And though she avoided the kind of prickly language that would suggest she still carried a grudge against Mr. Chertoff-who played a leading role in the Whitewater investigations that roiled the Clinton administration for years-she also avoided praising the nominee. Instead, Mrs. Clinton seems to have chosen a third path-call it détente-indicating that while she may never feel warm and fuzzy about Mr. Chertoff, she could certainly work with him.

"The Secretary of Homeland Security plays a very important role in ensuring the security of New York and the nation, which is why I believe that any nomination to such a position merits careful consideration," Mrs. Clinton said. "I look forward to meeting with Judge Chertoff in the very near future to discuss many important issues, including the specific homeland-security needs of New York as well as the many homeland-security challenges confronting our nation."

Mrs. Clinton's statement came at the end of a long day of speculation about how she would respond to the news that the President had tapped one of her arch foes for a top cabinet post. After all, the two have a long history, and Mrs. Clinton knows how to hold a grudge. In 2001, when the Senate voted to confirm Mr. Chertoff as head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division, New York's junior Senator cast the lone dissenting vote. Two years later, when the Senate voted 88 to 1 to approve Mr. Chertoff's nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals, Mrs. Clinton was again the lone dissenter.

Now, once again, Mrs. Clinton will get to vote on Mr. Chertoff's future, but her position this time is more complicated. Not only is she considering running for President and wary of taking unpopular positions, but she doesn't want to rile the man who will control New York's share of anti-terrorism funding, which has been a pet issue of hers.

The bad blood between Mrs. Clinton and the 51-year-old prosecutor stems from the tangled days when he served as chief counsel to Senator Alfonse D'Amato's Senate Whitewater investigation committee. For more than two years, he chipped zealously away at the investigation that would ultimately metastasize into the Monica Lewinsky affair. Mr. Chertoff personally delved into the suicide of deputy White House counsel Vince Foster. He also chased-and ultimately uncovered-the missing law-firm billing records that led directly to Mrs. Clinton's testimony before Kenneth Starr's grand jury.

In the end, Mr. Chertoff's efforts never produced enough evidence to charge Mrs. Clinton with any criminal wrongdoing in the Whitewater scandal. But Mrs. Clinton doesn't seem to forget those years. When Larry King asked her why she was the sole Senator to vote against Mr. Chertoff's appointment to the federal bench in 2003, Mrs. Clinton responded that it was essentially a protest vote against a man who symbolized "a lot of what was wrong" during the Whitewater era.

"During that time when he was on the staff of the committee in the Senate, a number of young people who worked in the White House were, I thought, very badly treated by the Senate staff investigating Whitewater," she told Mr. King. "And a number of those people were put under tremendous pressure-legal bills that they had to run up. And I just didn't think it was handled appropriately or professionally."

Freeze in the Thaw

Mr. Chertoff's nomination came just days after Newsweek reported that the relationship between President George W. Bush and former President Bill Clinton has recently "grown surprisingly warm and personal." And Mr. Bush's recent appointment of Mr. Clinton, along with the President's father, George H.W. Bush, to head up the tsunami fund-raising efforts seemed to further that perception. But the nomination of one of the Clintons' avowed foes could be seen as a slap in the face, a hostile act that could chill relations again.

"The Republicans don't like the Clintons, and this is the clearest message possible," said Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic consultant who worked on Mr. Clinton's 1996 re-election campaign. "And it certainly doesn't help in creating a friendship when you do business with somebody who's the sworn enemy of the person you're trying to befriend."

But Harold Ickes, a longtime Clinton confidante who was questioned by Mr. Chertoff during the Whitewater hearings, cautioned against reading too much into Mr. Chertoff's appointment. "I don't see this as a slap in the face to the Clintons," he said. "[Mr. Chertoff] is a highly, highly partisan person, but so is Don Rumsfeld and other people. It's a highly partisan administration."

Rudy May Still Have Some Clout

Mr. Chertoff's nomination also plays into the perennial Rudy-vs.-Hillary competition, since Mr. Chertoff was hired by Mr. Giuliani at the U.S. Attorney's office in the mid-80's and has contributed to his old boss' campaign committees. The nomination may demonstrate that Mr. Giuliani hasn't totally lost his clout with the Bush administration since the Bernie Kerik fiasco. A spokesperson for Mr. Giuliani would not say whether he was consulted on the appointment of Mr. Chertoff, but the former Mayor was quick to release a statement praising Mr. Chertoff as "an excellent choice for Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security."

"Obviously, Rudy is not completely tainted to the extent that anyone associated with him is not welcome," said one Republican political consultant. "But then again, they picked Mike because they know him, they trust him-he was one of [Attorney General John] Ashcroft's attack dogs. He's no Bernie Kerik. He's had a long, distinguished career since working with Rudy."

Back then, when he was working with Mr. Giuliani at the U.S. Attorney's office in Manhattan, Mr. Chertoff prosecuted numerous famous cases, from the "Crazy Eddie" trial to mob indictments involving Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno and Joseph Massino. Thereafter, he worked as a federal prosecutor in Newark, rising to U.S. Attorney in that office, where he developed a solid reputation going after corrupt politicians and more wiseguys. Since working at the Justice Department with Mr. Ashcroft, Mr. Chertoff has come under fire from liberal groups for defending the Bush administration's policy of allowing military tribunals for foreign terror suspects and the post-9/11 detention of hundreds of people. As a result, he's become a favorite of conservative policy groups and has been paid to speak to the Trilateral Commission and the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, among others.

Good for New York, Better for Jersey

Mr. Chertoff's nomination was applauded by Mr. Schumer, who proudly touted the fact that the nominee recognizes New York's homeland-security needs. But the choice of Mr. Chertoff could prove to be an even bigger boon for New Jersey, Mr. Chertoff's home state. His wife, Meryl, is a lawyer at Nancy H. Becker Associates, a Trenton-based lobbying firm whose clients include EDS, the giant information-technology services company, which has tens of millions of dollars in contracts with the Department of Homeland Security. Previously, as then-Governor Jim McGreevey's Washington liaison, she spearheaded efforts to secure homeland-security grants for the state, and she later worked for FEMA during its transition into the Department of Homeland Security.

As a result, the state's liberal Senators, Jon Corzine and Frank Lautenberg, were effusive in their praise of Mr. Chertoff. On the day of the announcement, Mr. Corzine called him "one of the most able people and public servants" he had ever known, and Mr. Lautenberg said that Mr. Chertoff's anti-terrorism experience will serve the country well.

No comment yet from Mrs. Clinton on the 10:00 a.m. nomination.

But Chuck Schumer, showing the same caution and restraint both Senators displayed in immediately lauding Bernie Kerick, put out a statement at 10:07. He called Chertoff "a strong choice."