wolfowitz is resigning. it's been obvious this was going that way since this scandal became public. or at least obvious to everyone but president bush.
it occurs to me that the bush administration doesn't know how to do resignations. i've mentioned a bunch of other times that this regime is unusual in the fact that people don't tend to resign when embarrassing stuff comes out. i guess it's a byproduct of a president who famously values loyalty.
but most administrations have done stuff differently. the normal game plan is something like this: a scandal comes out, the administration either gets someone to resign relatively soon, or initially mounts some sort of defense. but if the scandal shows that it has staying power, then someone resigns fairly soon afterwards if the defense doesn't nip the charges in the bud.
not every pre-bush scandal has worked that way, but prior administrations have all used the resignation strategy as part of their scandal-reaction playbook. the resignation can be effective because it allows you to get past the scandal: get it off the front page of the newspaper, and make it seem like there was some sort of accountability. they key is getting the scandal behind you. and that requires relatively quick action.
bush doesn't seem to follow that scenario. when resignations have occurred they tend to be long drawn-out affairs. rumsfeld left years after abu ghraib, years in which rummy served as a magnet for criticism for a whole assortment of issues. because rumsfeld was still in the bush administration, the criticism of him was also criticism of the administration. resignations only work as a way to diffuse a scandal if they are done quickly. rumsfeld is a case study of a particular inept resignation. even today, after rummy has been gone for months, bush's decision to stick by him despite everything remains in the public consciousness as an example of bush's bad judgment. when you wait too long, resignation is not as effective at deflecting blame.
rummy is just the most extreme example. but if alberto gonzales had resigned when the u.s. attorney scandal first broke, the half dozen other scandals it spawned may not have ever come to light. what started as a scandal about something unseemly but legal has thrown light on incidents of actual illegality. there's wouldn't have been any congressional investigation if gonzo took the blame and went home from day one.
which brings us to wolfie. he is a little different, because he was working for the world bank and not the administration directly. but that fact made it more important to get him to step down quickly, not less. the world bank governing structure is not entirely within the bush administration's control. in other words, wolfie could be fired, even if the president didn't want him to be gone. unlike members of his own cabinet, sticking by wolfie did not guarantee that he would be able to keep the job. so in that sense it was worse than rummy and gonzo. sticking with rummy or gonzo certainly have had their down sides, but the silver lining (from the president's perspective) is that at least he gets to keep the cabinet members he wants.
but sticking with wolfie has all of the costs of sticking with any scandal plagued individual--wolfie, like rummy, has been drawing fire towards the bush administration for the past month--with none of the benefit of keeping the guy you want to keep. so instead of bowing to the inevitable, bush had to sustain the past month of criticism of a man closely tied in the world's mind to bush's own administration. all of that for pretty much nothing.
put another way: resignation is only effective if it's done quickly. insisting that wolfie stay in the job even after it was pretty clear that this wouldn't just go away was just stupid.
