I can understand Republicans in DC being upset with the timing of Bush’s dismissal of Donald Rumsfeld. By waiting until the day after the election, the president seemed to have the political calculations backwards.
That said, Bob Novak wrote a scathing column yesterday on how Bush handled the Rumsfeld problem, but from an entirely different perspective. The president, Novak said, wasn’t loyal enough to Rumsfeld.
According to administration officials, only three or four people knew he would be fired — and Rumsfeld was not one of them. His fellow presidential appointees, including some who did not applaud Rumsfeld’s performance in office, were taken aback by his treatment.
In the two weeks since the election, I have asked a wide assortment of Republican notables their opinion of the Rumsfeld sacking. Only one went on the record: Rep. Duncan Hunter, the House Armed Services Committee chairman. A rare undeviating supporter of Rumsfeld, Hunter told me that “it was a mistake for him to resign.” The others, less supportive of Rumsfeld, said they were “appalled” — the most common descriptive word — by the president’s performance.
The treatment of his war minister connotes something deeply wrong with George W. Bush’s presidency in its sixth year. Apart from Rumsfeld’s failures in personal relations, he never has been anything short of loyal in executing the president’s wishes. But loyalty appears to be a one-way street for Bush.
The notion of Bush seeing loyalty as a one-way street isn’t exactly new. One need only ask Katherine Harris, who merely helped steal a presidential election for the man, about Bush’s true sense of loyalty.
Nevertheless, the political world, including many Republicans, saw Rumsfeld’s ouster as an obvious improvement. Indeed, it was long overdue — serious people had long since given up on trying to defend Rumsfeld’s bizarre behavior, decisions, and misjudgments. The president was, if anything, too loyal to his Defense Secretary.
But Novak describes a situation in which the GOP machine, or at least the most powerful parts of it, are dejected about Bush firing Rumsfeld. Most of the noise seems to be coming from the Vice President’s office.
It is hard to find anyone in the Bush administration who endorses the way Rumsfeld was handled. His friend and comrade, Vice President Cheney, is reported to be profoundly disturbed. But even before the election, Cheney appeared melancholy. A high-ranking administration official who visited the vice president then reported him to be nothing like the upbeat Cheney of earlier years in this administration.
Are the wheels coming off? A column like Novak’s is unexpected because it references “administration officials” who are clearly unhappy with the president. This column wouldn’t have been written a year ago — the Bush gang simply wouldn’t have been willing to highlight these kinds of divisions.
As Kleiman put it:
So what’s changed? Why, GWB is wounded, that’s what. Novak never kicks anyone who isn’t down already. Put it down as one more sign that The Good Ship Bush is foundering: even the rats are deserting.
It couldn’t have happened to a more appropriate president….