There’s micromanaging and then there’s not managing at all

When I was providing some extremely minor campaign advice for Bush during the 2000 election, a lot of my fellow academics would tease me about Bush being dumber than Gore. My automatic counter was to ask them which person they felt more confident in as a manager of the exective branch. There was Bush, who seemed to have mastered the fine balance between delegation and hands-on controlwhile governor of Texas. Then there was Gore, a decent, flawed man cursed with a legislator’s mentality, who never met an issue he couldn’t micro-manage to death. Even my most ardent liberal friends usually shut up when I brought this up (and, post-election, I had many off-the-record discussions with disgruntled Gore staffers confirming that management was Gore’s Achilles heel). I raise this point in the wake of this Washington Post behind-the-scenes piece on the Bush administration’s decision to go back to the United Nations for another Iraq resolution in the hopes of coaxing more non-American troops into the country (link via Josh Marshall). High up in the article there’s an astonishing couple of paragraphs:

On Tuesday, President Bush’s first day back in the West Wing after a month at his ranch, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell walked into the Oval Office to present something close to a fait accompli. In what was billed as a routine session, Powell told Bush that they had to go to the United Nations with a resolution seeking a U.N.-sanctioned military force in Iraq — something the administration had resisted for nearly five months. Powell, whose department had long favored such an action, informed the commander in chief that the military brass supported the State Department’s position despite resistance by the Pentagon’s civilian leadership. Bush and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, whose office had been slow to embrace the U.N. resolution, quickly agreed, according to administration officials who described the episode. Thus was a long and high-stakes bureaucratic struggle resolved, with the combined clout of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department persuading a reluctant White House that the administration’s Iraq occupation policy, devised by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, simply was not working…. For an administration that prides itself on centralized, top-down control, the decision to change course in Iraq was uncharacteristically loose and decentralized. As described by officials in the White House, State Department and Pentagon, the White House was the last to sign on to the new approach devised by the soldiers and the diplomats. “The [Pentagon] civilians had been saying we didn’t need any more troops, and the military brass had backed them,” a senior administration official said. “Powell’s a smart guy, and he knew that as soon as he had the brass behind him, that is very tough to ignore.” (emphasis added)

I’ve expressed my doubts about the international option, but I’ve also made clear that I think it’s a better choice than sticking with the status quo. That’s besides the point. What bothers me about this story is that the White House — on the most important foreign policy issue of the day, and potentially the biggest campaign issue for 2004 — was essentially a passive actor in this story. The President seemed perfectly comfortable to let Powell and Rumsfeld play bureaucratic politics with each other ad infinitum. Only when Powell and the Joint Chiefs were able to break the logjam did the policy shift — for more on this see this Marshall post as well. [Isn’t the Post story just another example of Powell puffery?–ed. The sourcing of the article — lots of DOD people — suggests that this version of events isn’t the result of Powell spinning the story]. Micro-managing an issue is one way for a President to screw up policy, but too much of a hands-off approach can be just as debilitating. This summer, the White House has veered too much in that direction. President Bush: hope you had a nice vacation at the ranch. Now get off your butt, take charge, manage the problem, and see your vision of a transformed Middle East through to its logical conclusion. Or, as Andrew Sullivan puts it:

C’mon, Dubya. Follow-through; follow-through. Some of us are worried not because we want you to fail, but because we want you to succeed.

As they say in Texas — yep. UPDATE: Powell and the Joint Chiefs are officially denying the Post’s version of events. Methinks they doth protest too much.