From a profile of Bob Bauer, the recently appointed White House counsel who replaced Greg Craig in the position:
The office Bauer inhabits, while coveted, has become a career graveyard in recent years, bogging down a string of lawyers as they tried to square controversial administration ideas with the law and political reality. When Craig was pushed out of the counsel's office last fall, it was, in part, because critics had concluded that the Guantanamo order was ill-advised and lacked political support. More dramatically, Alberto Gonzales was lashed for his role in the George W. Bush administration's policies on torture, detention and secrecy, and is now, despite his stature as a former attorney general, teaching a single class on politics at Texas Tech University. Harriet Miers, who succeeded Gonzales as White House counsel, left the year after her 2006 nomination to the Supreme Court collapsed.
One of these things is not like the others! Which is to say, there is some qualitative difference between Craig, who chose to depart after pushing a principled but politically challenging policy, and Gonzales, who created the entire mess of illegal torture that Craig was trying to repair. (Miers just inspires pity; she was harshly rejected by the very conservative establishment she served throughout her life.)
Catching Craig in the broad brush stroke of "career graveyard" is especially strange considering that his career situation is pretty good: Two of the most important law firms in the country fought to hire him when he departed the White House, and now he's starting a surely lucrative new practice here in Washington. Could it be Karma?
-- Tim Fernholz
