The conventional wisdom was that President Bush wouldn't be able to get someone of stature to take the post of Treasury secretary whenever John Snow's much-rumored departure finally happened

National Review, June 19, 2006

* The conventional wisdom was that President Bush wouldn't be able to get someone of stature to take the post of Treasury secretary whenever John Snow's much-rumored departure finally happened. But Bush defied the skeptics and landed Henry Paulson, the widely respected chairman of Goldman Sachs.

Paulson is a conservative with instant credibility on Wall Street, and he lends the Bush economic team the gravitas it has lacked until now. An effective Treasury secretary is listened to, either in Washington or on Wall Street--or, ideally, both. Bush's first Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, was an irrelevance. Snow had the best of intentions, but as a former CEO of a railroad he wasn't well known on Wall Street and was undercut in Washington by White House leaks against him. Treasury has been a much-diminished department in the Bush years. The White House would be well advised to allow it to regain some of its heft and have a stronger voice in policy formulation, especially now that it has a sterling new secretary.