Sorry I am late on this, but it's from last night's Nelson Report:

SUMMARY: former Deputy Secretary of State and USTR Bob Zoellick, now an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, will be named to replace Paul Wolfowitz as president of the World Bank, sources confirm.

A formal announcement is expected tomorrow morning (Wed., May 30) from the White House, it is generally understood. Zoellick had tried, very hard, to get the Bank prior to Wolfowitz's selection, and you can imagine that in recent months, more than one White House official wishes he had been successful.

From the Administration's standpoint, Zoellick is a "safe" choice, in that he is not scandal-prone, and carries no toxic baggage from the Iraq disaster. His work on Darfur should have shown Wolfowitz's Sub Saharan African constituency that Zoellick is sensitive to issues of concern to them. His work at USTR got him into the international elites of trade ministerials, and at State with the foreign ministers and heads of state.

Continued after the jump.

Zoellick's contribution to adult supervision of Asia policy was and remains critical, especially his coining of the "responsible stakeholder" concept to give China a set of positive values and ideas to meld with government policy at home and abroad - something of a set of "benchmarks" by which to chart China's progress as a reliable international partner to the West.

There is a potential down side, of course, as with any nomination made in extremis, and in Zoellick's case it's the risk that certain personality traits will carry over, and create problems with his Bank colleagues different than the Wolfowitz debacle, but no less damaging, should they occur.

Recall that Zoellick was forced out of his presidency of CSIS here in Washington, with the official reason being his too-overt politicking for then-Republican nominee George Bush. In reality, veterans of CSIS during that period will tell you, Zoellick had by that time made himself very unpopular with both the Board and his colleagues for some of the same problems which cropped up at USTR:

He has a terrible temper, he is "prone to tirades" - a daily dump on Japan generally, and its trade ministers specifically, came to be something of a ritual at USTR - and he has been known to keep "enemies lists". Probably this Report tonight will get us back on one from which it took us two years to escape. But you do have to wonder the level of joy in Tokyo over his appointment will be tempered by memory of his many public and private condemnations.

It was long a matter of "inside knowledge" that Rice and President Bush respected Zoellick to the point of giving him virtual autonomy in his spheres of operation, but that Zoellick's penchant to lecture, point by point, with little concern for editorial compression, drove them slightly bonkers. A telling story attributed to Condi Rice by a fellow journalist, "Condi let's Bob do whatever he wants, so long as she doesn't have to talk to him about it."

Zoellick also has some potential problems with Democrats on Capitol Hill, since his tenure at USTR came during the height of the Tom DeLay/Bill Thomas apartheid policy which barely allowed House Dems to vote, and which by design refused Dems any serious trade policy role. As Deputy Sec State, Zoellick presumably repaired some of the bridges he helped burn, by his acquiescence to those First Term tactics - a period you can never forget, if you try to parse, now, the Rangel/Schwab negotiations on Labor and the Environment, Panama, Colombia, et al.

But for the White House, apparently all is forgotten and/or forgiven, and once again it can be seen that Bush values and will promote loyalty, above all else. In Zoellick's case, however, his intellectual qualifications, his sincerity, and his passion for the job cannot be understated.