Base Concerns

I hate to pick on Robert Novak, who's having a really bad summer, what with the whole Valerie Plame thing and walking off the set at CNN, but I just have to take note of his drearily cynical column today on Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., and the potential closing of Ellsworth Air Force Base in the state. Novak chastises the Bush White House for failing to back up Thune's efforts to keep Ellsworth open. (The first-term senator had campaigned partly on the issue of how his connections with the administration would put him in a better position than the man he beat--former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle--to keep the base open.) Novak accuses the White House of the cardinal sin of being more interested in the integrity of the base-closure process than its political ramifications. "The Bush team," he writes, "looked like tone-deaf, old-fashioned Republicans interested more in going by the book than winning elections."