Politics & Power Quote by Donald Rumsfeld

Rumsfeld isn’t offering management advice so much as a survival tactic for governing at speed: if you’re going to spend scarce presidential attention, extract not just an answer but a rule. The line has the crisp, procedural chill of the national security state, where ambiguity breeds interagency turf wars and where tomorrow’s crisis will arrive before today’s memo is filed.

The intent is bureaucratic leverage. “Raise issues” isn’t about deliberation; it’s about framing. Staffers are told to package a problem in a way that forces the President to articulate a principle, creating a reusable authorization slip. In Washington, precedent isn’t just legal; it’s operational. It becomes a weapon in later arguments: you can close down debate by citing “what the President decided last time,” even when the facts are only roughly similar.

Subtext: the real contest is control of the future. By “evok[ing] broader policy guidance,” you steer the administration’s default settings. That guidance shapes what options will be considered “reasonable” later, and which will be treated as out of bounds. It’s also an admission that crises are rarely one-offs; they’re patterns. The official who gets the principle on paper effectively writes part of the next playbook.

Context matters: Rumsfeld’s tenure at Defense was defined by rapid post-9/11 decision-making, legal gray zones, and constant pressure to act. In that environment, precedent is both efficiency and escape hatch. It accelerates action while distributing responsibility upward: if the President set the rule, everyone else can execute it - and point to it - when the next “similar issue” inevitably lands.