Not surprisingly, this is not a major infusion for the Bush Whitehouse. CNN's Dana Bash, says, "Hes' not new blood, in the president's cabinet for seven years.... This might not be the end of the story."
Bolten has been in and around the whitehouse for a long time, starting under Bush senior, as a lobbyist and deputy Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs. Then he served as policy director for Bush's presidential campaign. Once Dubya got into the Whitehouse, Bolten
was deputy chief of staff for policy, before being appointed the OMB Director, in charge of trillions of dollars of government spending.
Bolton, who Bush calls "Yosh," was chosen as to head the OMB because he was the person most familiar with Bush's policies. The same logic assuredly applies to his new appointment to replace Andy Card. According to an article profiling Bolten in Stanford Lawyer magazine he and Al Gore went the same private school, St. Albans. And like George W. Bush, Bolten's father worked for an espionage agency, in this case, the FBI.
The OMB offers this bio of Bolten:
On June 26, 2003, the United States Senate confirmed Joshua B. Bolten as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Mr. Bolten was sworn in on June 30, 2003. As Director of OMB, Mr. Bolten will help oversee the preparation of the Federal budget and supervise its administration in Executive Branch agencies. He will work closely with Congress and federal departments to successfully implement the President's agenda, from growing the economy and creating jobs to ensuring a strong national defense and a secure homeland.
From January 2001 through June of 2003, Mr. Bolten was Assistant to the President and Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy at the White House. From March 1999 through November 2000, he was Policy Director of the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign. Mr. Bolten also served as Policy Director of the Bush-Cheney transition. From 1994 to 1999, he was Executive Director, Legal & Government Affairs, for Goldman Sachs International in London.
During the Administration of President George H.W. Bush, Mr. Bolten served for three years as General Counsel to the U.S. Trade Representative and one year in the White House as Deputy Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs. Previously, from 1985 to 1989, he was International Trade Counsel to the US Senate Finance Committee. Earlier, Mr. Bolten was in a private law practice with O'Melveny & Myers, and worked in the legal office of the U.S. State Department. He also served as Executive Assistant to the Director of the Kissinger Commission on Central America.
Mr. Bolten received his B.A. with distinction from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (1976) and his J.D. from Stanford Law School (1980), where he was an editor of the Stanford Law Review. Immediately after law school, he served as a law clerk at the U.S. District Court in San Francisco. During the fall semester of 1993, Mr. Bolten taught international trade at Yale Law.
