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 ow
can Don Rumsfeld — the two-time Secretary of Defense, the world-conquering
businessman, strategic thinker, and GOP operator, the foremost stud
of the Bush cabinet — possibly be failing?
Two words:
President Bush.
As I argue
in the new National Review, President Bush has left Rumsfeld
in an impossible situation. The SecDef can adequately fund neither
the current force nor the notional future force. Rumsfeld's
failing, then, is really Bush's.
The president
also bears ultimate responsibility for the strategic meanderings
that have gotten Rumsfeld battered almost every day, in articles
in the Washington Post and elsewhere. Big changes — like
reorienting the national-security strategy of the United States
— just can't be left to sort themselves out in the bowels of cabinet
agencies.
Defense funding
has been the occasion for much ideological gamesmanship lately,
with neocons, neoliberals, and just plain old Democratic partisans
all ignoring the Social Security lockbox, the Medicare lockbox,
domestic spending, and the economic downturn, in order to blame
the defense-spending pinch on just one factor: the tax cut.
Since those
lockboxes are almost entirely fictional — Jonathan Chait of The
New Republic has described them as "an artificial device"
— this is not even the traditional competition between guns and
butter, but between guns and fake butter.
Once all the
spin and Washington fictions are brushed away, the fundamental question
is whether it makes more sense to invest in defense spending or
in debt retirement — the use to which the lockbox funds are actually
put. (In the current NR, Ramesh Ponnuru catches a variety
of lockbox fanatics, including Paul Krugman, in an opportunistic
flip-flop — they used to pooh-pooh the significance of the Social
Security trust fund, until it became convenient for the Democrats
to believe that the fund actually means something.)
If we were to have this debate, by any reasonable standard, the
outcome should be obvious. Since the armed forces are in a state
of near-crisis, and since the debt is already quite low by both
historical and international standards, it makes the most public-policy
sense to find more money for the military.
Bush won't
do this — not just because playing the lockbox pretend-game is so
important, but also because it would interfere with his political
repositioning more generally.
The White House
has decided that Bush is perceived as being "too conservative,"
therefore he is going to talk less about taxes and national security.
Let's accept the premise for a moment. It would still be ill-advised
for Bush to de-emphasize taxes and defense — these are conservative
strengths.
The equivalent
would be for a Democratic politician to decide that he is too liberal,
therefore he's going to talk less about the environment, education,
and Medicare — when those are the liberals' main political assets.
A shrewd repositioning would instead involve continuing to hit on
those issues, while also finding new symbolic conservative ones
— exactly what Bill Clinton did.
On this model,
Bush should abandon his ANWR drilling plan — which may produce only
a negligible amount of oil anyway — and pursue photo-ops with caribou.
He should personally deliver prescription-drug discount cards to
as many seniors as possible. But he should also continue pushing
on taxes and defense — exactly those issues where the public is
likely to find his conservatism most congenial.
Not to mention
the fact that, politics aside, defense spending is extremely important.
But the chances
of Bush doing this are quite slim. Lucky for him, he has Don Rumsfeld
to take the fall for it.
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