The Perils of the Permanent Campaign

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The second terms of Presidents are notoriously dreadful, but I wonder: Has the Permanent Campaign made the problem worse because it renders the politicians more myopic? Republicans seem better at campaigns, permanent and otherwise, than Democrats. It may be that conservatives just don't take governance as seriously as liberals do, and therefore have more freedom to maneuver. Didn't Reagan say government was "the problem, not the solution"? The very notion of planning for the common good, especially long-term planning, seems vaguely ... socialist, doesn't it? The Bush Administration is filled with hard-charging executives but bereft of meat-and-potatoes managers. Not much priority is placed on pedestrian things like delivering the ice to New Orleans or keeping the peace in Baghdad.

Important government agencies—the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency—are run by political cronies or worse, by special-interest allies of the President intent on eviscerating the regulatory power of the agencies they were sent to manage. There is an arrogant slovenliness to it all that neuters the essential tenets of the conservative vision—that efficient markets are the best way to create wealth, that Democrats are puerile dreamers and Republicans adult realists.

A library will be written about the President's decision to preempt the nonexistent threat of Saddam Hussein's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. It was a tough call, with principled arguments on both sides, and it is easy to forget now that almost everyone, even the French, believed that the weapons existed. But there was nothing principled about the Administration's failure to recognize that lethal chaos was likely to follow the invasion. There was a delusional unwillingness to plan for a guerrilla insurgency, especially on the part of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who vastly underestimated the number of troops necessary for the operation—and who uttered some of the most embarrassing words ever spoken by a U.S. official as anarchy took hold. "Stuff happens," Rumsfeld said, when asked about the looting in Baghdad at an April 11, 2003, press conference. "... [F]reedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things."

But worse, far worse, was the tendency of the White House—particularly Karl Rove's message apparatus—to see the war as part of the Permanent Campaign, as a political opportunity at first and then, as the news turned bad, as merely another issue to be massaged. There is something quite obscene about the existence of the White House Iraq Group (whig). Its job had nothing to do with the military or political situation in Iraq; it was created to market the war and to smear the President's opponents. Rove and Libby were at the heart of this group. Their decision to ask Congress for a war resolution in September 2002, two months before the congressional elections, seemed an obvious marketing ploy. Rove told Republicans that they could "go to the country with this issue," that it would reinforce the party's image as strong on defense. The simultaneous decision to take the Iraq situation to the United Nations was also a campaign ploy—polls showed the vast majority of voters favored this course—and a chimera. Both Cheney and Rumsfeld were opposed to the move, and Rumsfeld pretty much ignored it: he proceeded full-speed ahead, deploying troops for a late-winter invasion.