[Dales]

"There is nothing in his resume to indicate even rudimentary managerial or political skills"

He's the former head of the DOJ's Criminal Division, which is indicative of both much beyond the rudimentary level.

[Sarastro]

Stepping in as head of a small bureaucracy that's running on auto-pilot is not in the same league as trying to tame a beast with hundreds of thousands of employees.

Moreover, Chertoff is the genius who indicted Arthur Andersen to teach them a lesson. As a direct consequence, they promptly failed with the loss of over 100,000 jobs worldwide and left the financial markets with only four surviving firms large enough to audit world finance and industry. This is now widely seen as a disastrous miscalculation on the part of DOJ. It tells me that Chertoff's vaunted intelligence is of the theoretical, not practical, kind.

If he gets the job, good luck to him (and us), because we'll all need it. But his nomination is a mistake.