Rumsfeld, Fall Guy
An impossible situation for the SecDef.

August 17, 2001 3:10 p.m.

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.