Who's who.

• Author: Glastris, Paul
• Position: Brief Article

When anthrax-laced letters turned up on Capitol Hill last month, House Speaker Dennis Hastert shut down the House of Representatives. His decision drew praise from colleagues who were able to head home a day earlier than expected. Media reaction to Hastert's decision was summed up in a New York Post headline: "WIMPS." By contrast, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle kept his chamber in session at the urging of fellow senators. In retrospect, Daschle's decision was probably the wiser one. But the question remains: Are senators really more courageous? Or do congressmen, who face re-election every two years rather than every six, simply have a stronger reflexive desire to get back to their districts?

President George W. Bush and most of his White House staff are winning extraordinary praise for their job performance since September 11. The same cannot be said for press spokesman Ari Fleischer. His public reputation took a hit when he censoriously warned that people like TV talk show host Bill Maher "need to watch what they say." Privately, many reporters are even more irritated by his querulousness and the stinginess with which he doles out information. At an Oct. 16 White House briefing, for instance, Fleischer refused again and again to characterize the sending of letters filled with anthrax as "bio-terrorism." Yet days earlier, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson had said, "there's no question it's bio-terrorism," and Vice President Dick Cheney had said, "the only responsible thing to do is to proceed on the basis that it could be linked to terrorists." With so little information coming from Fleischer, reporters have had to go over his head, phoning senior White House officials for the most basic information--something unlikely to endear Fleischer to his colleagues.

In late September, conservative commentators, led by Andrew Sullivan, launched a mini-campaign to pin blame for the September 11 attacks primarily on Bill Clinton. The criticism was based on comments by ex-Clintonites Nancy Soderberg and Jamie Gorelick who told The Boston Globe that the administration could and should have done more to stop terrorism. But for the moment, the campaign has fizzled for three reasons. First, The Washington Post's Bob Woodward, Tom Ricks, and Barton Gellman broke news of energetic if unsuccessful covert efforts by the Clinton administration to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Second, it's become increasingly clear that the FBI, until...