Very little about Donald Rumsfeld’s tenure at the Pentagon has made sense. He was an odd choice to run the Defense Department; he immediately alienated everyone he was supposed to work with; he refused to listen to anyone who disagreed with him; he lost the confidence of the generals; and he created and executed a disastrous policy in Iraq.
But from a purely political perspective, Rumsfeld’s ouster is just as bewildering as the rest of term. Reading over the dailies this morning, all of them note that the president did not want an announcement about replacing Rumsfeld to affect the elections. Bush felt so strongly about it, he blatantly lied to reporters, a fact which he openly acknowledged yesterday.
But this leads to the question: wouldn’t it have been better, from Bush’s perspective, to do this before the election? TNR’s Christopher Orr explained this well.
Is it just me, or has Bush handled the Rumsfeld firing about as poorly as possible from a political perspective? If he’d fired Rummy months, perhaps even weeks, ago, he might have reassured centrist voters that he recognized how poorly things were going in Iraq, and limited the damage he sustained in the midterms. Instead, he bulled forward with a Rovian confidence game, claiming everything was going fine, he’d never let Don or Dick leave his side, and a vote against him was a vote for the terrorists.
Then, after his midterm “thumping,” he turns on a dime, firing Rummy and essentially handing his foreign policy over to the realists he’d frozen out all these years. Wouldn’t it have made more sense — again, politically speaking — for him to make this evolution a little more gradual?
I’m not complaining, of course; Rumsfeld’s ouster made the midterm results just a little sweeter. But I’m trying to understand the politics here. Weren’t there a bunch of unsuccessful Republican candidates turning on their TVs last night saying, “Now you’re firing him?”
The president, if his latest version of events is true, knew Rumsfeld was getting the boot. Had he made the change before the elections, Bush could have demonstrated some flexibility on the number one issue on voters’ minds. For that matter, he could have made it easier on Republican candidates who found it difficult to defend Rumsfeld with a straight face. It might also have sent a message to independents: we’ve made some mistakes, but we’re taking steps to set things right.
Instead, Rove & Co. decided to keep the good news under wraps until it was too late, and left voters with the impression that the ineffective and incompetent Defense Secretary wasn’t going anywhere before 2008, giving Dems yet another campaign talking point about the need for more congressional oversight of an administration gone astray.
Orr added:
Firing Rumsfeld the morning after…seems hasty, impetuous, and desperate. Instead of bending with the new political winds, it looks like he broke; instead of agreeing to course corrections, he pulled a one-eighty. What he might otherwise have portrayed as a compromise looks more like a surrender. Moreover, by admitting that his I’ll-stick-with-Rummy posture of last week was basically a lie and that he’d already been talking with Gates about replacing him, he totally undermines what may be his single greatest political asset: his reputation as a guy who tells it like it is and sticks to his guns even when things aren’t going well.
If there’s a logical strategy at play, it’s hiding well. I’m starting to think I’ve overestimated the Bush gang’s political acumen for far too long.
Post Script: By the way, in case anyone needs a primer, Phillip Carter wrote a good piece for Slate cataloging some of Rumsfeld’s biggest blunders. It’s just an overview — lengthy books can and will be written about Rumsfeld’s painful tenure — but it hits many of the highlights.