Chairmanship

The County Council unanimously elected C. Vernon Gray as chairman Monday.It is the fourth time he has held the post, but the first since 1987.Republican Charles Feaga was also nominated for the council chairmanship -- by fellow Republican and council newcomer Darrel Drown -- but declined.The council then unanimously voted for Gray.Gray's nominator, outgoing council chairwoman Shane Pendergrass, was elected chairwoman of the Zoning Board, also unanimously, although Feaga stated his reservations that he hasn't "always been pleased in the past" with Pendergrass's performance.

William J. Dodd, Louisiana's lieutenant governor under Earl Long in the 1940s and '50s, died of cancer Saturday in Baton Rouge. He was 81. Mr. Dodd, who began his political career as a state legislator from 1940 to 1948, employed a folksy style on the stump.Camilla Davis Trammell, Houston philanthropist, died Friday at age 72. She was married to Houston oilman John Blaffer, who died in 1973. Mr. Blaffer was the son of a founder of Humble Oil Co., which later became Exxon. In 1953, the couple donated the Blaffer Wing to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts.

WASHINGTON - -A game of musical committee chairs in the U.S. Senate ended Wednesday and left Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski of Maryland right where she is: as the most senior senator without a committee chairmanship. Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin is taking over as head of the Senate health committee, succeeding Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, who died last month at the age of 77. Connecticut Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, who took charge of health legislation while Kennedy struggled with brain cancer, was first in line to chair the committee, formally known as Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

Bill Clinton, John Sununu and Lamar Alexander took the job and became national figures. Scott Matheson, Julian Carroll and Booth Gardner did it too, but never became familiar names.Now, Parris N. Glendening has maneuvered himself into the position of future chairman of the National Governors' Association. He quietly campaigned for months for the chairmanship, provoking speculation that he, like so many governors before him, wants to raise his national profile and land a Cabinet post or other high-ranking job when he leaves office.

WASHINGTON -- The speaker of the House has recommended that Rep. Kweisi Mfume be elected chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, a plum that would broaden the Baltimore Democrat's congressional resume while making him the first black to control the influential panel.The Joint Economic Committee does not handle legislation, but it employs a staff of economists charged with making an annual economic report to Congress. The panel also conducts monthly hearings, at which the Bureau of Labor Statistics unveils national unemployment figures, and serves as a kind of economic think tank for Congress.

WASHINGTON -- Rep. Kweisi Mfume yesterday announced his candidacy for the chairmanship of the House Democratic TC Caucus, the third-highest party leadership post in the incoming Congress and one that is integral to reshaping the Democrats' overall image."

EVEN IF William Clay Ford Jr. were a manager of proven genius, chances of his ascending to the chairmanship of Ford Motor Co. at the tender age of 41 would have been close to zilch.To pretend that his appointment last week wasn't an act of nepotism is silly. True, young Mr. Ford will have Jacques Nasser, Ford's new chief executive officer, to steady his hand. And he stressed that "I will lead the board. Jac will lead the company." But this seems only to suggest young Mr. Ford, great-grandson of the company's founder, isn't yet up to leading the corporation he chairs.

Excruciating is the word for the Senate Ethics Committee as it contemplates the fallout of its party-line tie vote not to hold public hearings on sexual misconduct and abuse of office charges against Sen. Bob Packwood. It now must decide whether to censure the Oregon Republican, strip him of his chairmanship of the powerful Senate Finance Committee or expel him from its ranks.Republican senators who went to the mat for a colleague now find themselves under pressure to select a severe form of punishment.

WASHINGTON -- Confronted with the unhappy prospect of being left outside the national spotlight he has enjoyed for the past two years, Rep. Kweisi Mfume sent a letter yesterday to his Democratic colleagues, telling them he plans to be a candidate for an unspecified "leadership position" in the next Congress."

THE MILITARY JUNTA strangling Myanmar has survived with a lot of help from its Southeast Asian neighbors. After all, Myanmar's generals offer natural resources, slave labor and a profitable drug trade. And anyway, a key principle of the region's top political organization, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, has long been noninterference in its members' internal affairs. But Myanmar is to take over leadership of ASEAN next year. And given the regime's brutality, that honor finally is proving embarrassing enough that officials from some of the group's 10 members - Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines - have been calling for preventing Myanmar from assuming this chairmanship.