Our concern about Ms. Rice is not that she makes the president feel comfortable. It's that as national security adviser, she seemed to tell him what he wanted to hear about decisions he'd already made, rather than what he needed to know to make sound judgments in the first place.

That was particularly true when it came to the issue of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Ms. Rice, who appeared so often on the Sunday morning talk shows and even on the campaign trail that she sometimes seemed more like a press secretary than a national security adviser, was the one who told the country that Saddam Hussein was actively pursuing nuclear weapons. And she ominously warned that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."