BUSH ADMINISTRATION Speculation abounds about 2nd-term shuffle

If there is a second Bush term, will Condoleezza Rice stay or go?
LOS ANGELES TIMES
WASHINGTON -- When Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, testifies this week before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, much of Washington will be watching raptly -- not to hear what she says, but to see whether she blows her chance of getting a Cabinet post if Bush is re-elected.
Rice has been a focus of controversy ever since her former counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, accused her of failing to focus on the threat posed by Al-Qaida. 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 would get 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."
Would she or wouldn't she?
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 quite sure what happens to the controversial deputy secretary of defense, Paul D. Wolfowitz.
Not talking
President Bush isn't saying what his second-term intentions are -- neither are Rice, Powell nor Rumsfeld. But that doesn't stop the speculation.
"The scuttlebutt ... [is that] Powell will leave quickly, Rumsfeld will leave later," said David R. Gergen, a former aide to presidents of both parties. He added that he has 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 M. 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 thinks Rice wants to return to her old job as a professor there. But he added: "What happens if Bush is re-elected and asks her to do something? It's tough to know."
Likely to leave job?
In any case, Riceologists said, she is unlikely to want to spend another four years as national security adviser. "Condi ... has always had a fetish for not staying too long in the same place," said Brent Scowcroft, who hired her for her first White House job in 1989 under President George H.W. Bush. (She stayed in that job for only 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 J. Hadley, NSC's No. 2 and a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, and Robert D. Blackwill, 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 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.