Bill Frist is majority leader of the U.S. Senate, and there are no references in the job description to "beanbag."
So when Frist went after Richard Clarke last week, the only surprise was that for all the tough talk, the attack seemed so oddly dispassionate. The problem, of course, is that an attack on Clarke is best delivered by a shrewd partisan fighter, which the majority leader is not. But that's the trade-off the administration made when it banished Trent Lott from the job in favor of the more palatable Frist.
With the administration under siege, Frist went to the Senate floor and suggested that Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar, might be subject to criminal prosecution for perjury. Frist's speech was a clear signal that the beanbag was over.
It's possible that Bush and Co. had decided that the Clarke episode was not just a brush blaze but a raging fire in the engine room. They needed all hands on deck.
However, many wondered whether Frist was carrying water for the White House at its request or taking action of his own volition. Frist seemed almost physically uncomfortable with the charges he leveled against Clarke. During his speech, he raised a bunch of questions about Clarke and quite a few about himself.
The official line is that, because he was so outraged by Clarke's testimony and the inconsistencies he detected, this was Frist's idea.
"[Frist] did this on his own," said one senior aide. "It was just a matter of our intelligence people coming to us and saying, 'Look, this is not what [Clarke] said before.' So we had to correct his mistakes, of omission and commission."
Even so, in the context of the moment, the event had the feel of a troop mobilization, a coordinated campaign orchestrated by the White House.
Not the case, insists the staff.
But another semi-important question is if the White House needed to ask. Whether Frist was carrying water for the president at the president's behest or not, he was carrying water for the president. And here we step into the good-news/bad-news zone for both the majority leader and the White House.
When the White House traded in Lott for Frist, it did so with its eyes wide open. Bush and Co. were going into an election year and had to get back to the idea that they were compassionate conservatives. The sharp-elbowed, body-punching Lott did not meet the specs.
Frist was a soft-spoken heart surgeon who spent a chunk of his summers working with AIDS patients in Africa. While Lott had graduated from Ole Miss, Frist had gone to Princeton and to Harvard Medical School. He was a healer who had attended to Strom Thurmond when the South Carolinian fell ill on the Senate floor, not a divider who seemed to have fond memories of Thurmond's segregationist past.
The good news is that Frist has lived up to that image. But when the administration needs a street fighter, he may not be the man. Dealing with Clarke, Frist appeared as a clinician, without convincing outrage.
Frist talked tough, saying: "Notwithstanding Mr. Clarke's efforts to use his book first and foremost to shift blame and attention from himself, it is also clear that Mr. Clarke and his publishers adjusted the release date of his book in order to make maximum gain from the publicity around the 9-11 hearings. I find this to be an appalling act of profiteering, trading on his insider access to highly classified information and capitalizing upon the tragedy that befell this nation on September 11, 2001."
But Frist's heart wasn't in it -- especially when he went after Clarke for apologizing to the victims' families.
"It is understandable why some of the families who lost loved ones in the 9-11 attacks find Mr. Clarke's performance appealing," Frist said. "Simple answers to a terrible tragedy, to the very human desire to find an answer why -- why on that beautiful fall day two and one half years ago, a series of events happened that shattered their lives forever."
As harsh as those words were, they did not have the blowtorch quality so common on the Hill. This was no job for a compassionate conservative. But the administration may have played itself, changing the book cover without changing the playbook.
Some Republicans believe that Frist hasn't taken enough bullets for the president, the way Lott did time and time again. There are basically three camps: those who believe that Frist is still learning all the tricks of the game, those who think he's temperamentally unsuited for the task, and those who think he's positioning himself for later greatness and is thus just safeguarding his own image.
Truth be told, Frist was up against something larger: He was up against Clarke, who understands that beanbag went out of style a long time ago in this town -- and it ain't coming back.
Terence Samuel is the chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. His column about politics appears each week in the online edition of The American Prospect.
