Presidential Transitions

Imagine, as a good adviser should, arising after a long, itchy day and night to realization that the campaign years have ended and that you have been elected President of the United States, head of the only superpower in the world, as the cliché has it, and that in less than three months you will have been sworn in, responsible for everything from a congressional agenda to committing troops, from succoring flood victims to reassuring stockholders, from outwitting terrorists to launching fresh initiatives for peace in unlikely places.  Few human beings have to face and surmount the strain of switching suddenly from all-out campaigner in an atmosphere of sweaty effort, simple goals, to cooler tasks of governing amidst the endless ambiguities of complicated purposes and pressures. And in between there are, at once, the varied tasks-imperative yet scarcely understood from other people's recollections-of administration building in full view of a tetchy, hungry press corps. That strain, moreover, is not what it was in the last weeks of 1960, Kennedy's time for bipartisanship, or the last month of 1980, with Reagan's revolution on the verge, the hostages almost home, and the Democrats cowed by losing the Senate. The strain is not what it was; under current conditions it could well be worse.  Save for nuclear risks, currently in abeyance, all the conditions are harsher: The activists are louder on more fronts, the press is more insistent, Congress is less respectful, and the voters, seemingly, are soaked in cynicism tempered by prosperity. Yet Presidents-elect are under a necessity to keep their balance, and their temper, and their sense of humor-God willing that they have one-throughout the eleven weeks, so they can take them to the White House intact. For they will need them there, as will the country.  The imperative for their advisers, in transition time, is to acknowledge that, respect it, and facilitate it all they can. What do such advisers need most? In my estimation, two things: Empathy for their President-to-be. And for themselves, ego control.

There are dangers, obviously involved with beginning the process of the transition before you're elected. Only because people will think it's very presumptive to try to go ahead and prepare for what may happen if you're elected particularly in a very close election. But on the other hand, I think it's absolutely essential. I think that if you don't begin that process early on, what happens is that once the election takes place, you find yourself a little behind the eight ball, in the sense that you then have to pull together a quick transition team. He has to put together a budget document right off the bat.

Number one: who are some of the people that ought to be part of the cabinet? Number two: look at the White House staff and the way you want to organize it. Who some of the key people that you want to perform in those areas? And three, begin to think about the kind of policy papers that need to be developed and the kind of strategy that the President wants to put in place, not only from the election to the inauguration, but throughout the first 100 days. You can start it in September. But, keep it quiet and keep it informal.

This lens was selected by Squidoo as the "Lens of the Day" on election day, with the following commentary:

At the time of this posting (3:40pm PST on November 4th, 2008) we don't know who will win the election. We will soon.

Any chad-catastrophes aside, either Obama or McCain will wake up tomorrow, on the morning of November 5th, with the knowledge that precious weeks later he will step into the Oval Office.

Regardless of who wins, this lens by the ever industrious, illustrious lensmaster John Fenzel should be an interesting read.

He writes:

"When a candidate for President of the United States wakes up the morning after the election, what are the realities he or she faces? This lens attempts to convey the enormous challenges that confront a president-elect in the lead up to Inauguration Day."

The appointments process has become brutal in the length of time that it takes for many people to go through this process once a cabinet has been named. Not to mention the invasion of privacy and the complexity of this whole process. It is hell to go through the appointment process and the nominating process. And the way the process is structured now it almost presumes guilt on the part of the candidate for a particular office. But then the staff on Capitol Hill goes into their checks, goes through the process, looks at your financial records, looks at all of the bits and pieces that at one point was considered to be part of your private life, and now is fully exposed. There are a lot of people out there who are very qualified and very capable who don't want to go through that process. If you're President of the United States, you want to know whether you're going to be blindsided by people. Because sometimes, even your best friends who you might want to nominate, are not going to tell you everything that happened.

First, to the extent that you can streamline this process is to try to work with the FBI, make sure that you really develop a team of people to immediately do the background checks. It's going to impact with sub-cabinet officials as well.

If you want to get off on the right foot, you have to do is sit down with the leadership in the Congress, particularly on the Senate side, because the it's the Senate side that does the advise and consent on most of these nominations. Sit down with whoever the majority leader is on the Senate side and the minority leader for that matter. And the chairmen and ranking members of committees that are going to handle these nominations and try to establish some rapport with them on the basis of, "Look, I need to put my team in place. It's important for the country. I want to respond to your concerns."

The process ultimately runs into a wall of partisanship on Capitol Hill, particularly if you happen to be a President where the Congress belongs to the other party. What tends to happen is that the other party will look at these nominations and decide which ones they want to take on for political purposes. Which means that if you're a target, then you're facing a real grilling in terms of Capitol Hill. It has been suggested in other venues that administrations may consider raising "sacrificial lambs," meant to fail the nomination process (e.g. Ted Sorenson was nominated for DCI during the Carter Administration, and withdrew his nomination on the first day of hearings).

Roosevelt had a strong sense of a cardinal fact in government: That Presidents don't act on policies, programs, or personnel in the abstract; they act in the concrete as they meet deadlines set by due dates-or the urgency-of documents awaiting signature, vacant posts awaiting appointees, officials seeking interviews, newsmen seeking answers, audiences waiting for a speech, intelligence reports requiring a response, etc., etc. He also had a strong sense of another fact in government: That persons close to Presidents are under constant pressure-and temptation-to go into business for themselves, the more so as the word gets out that they deal regularly with some portion of his business.

The earlier you begin that process and begin identifying who are some of the possible candidates that I want for Secretary of State, Attorney General, the key positions in your cabinet, the earlier you can start looking at that person's bio and background and the possible issues that are out there, so that once the election takes place, you're at least ahead of the game in saying, "Look this person, for whatever reason, is not somebody that this issue would blow up on." The longer it takes, the more pressure you're confronting, because suddenly you're into January and you don't have all of your cabinet in place. And so you're starting to rush.

Then you're trying to figure out who's going to be on the White House staff. You're going to be having policy papers thrown at you left and right. If you wait too long, you really don't hit the ground running, which is what you have to do as President of the United States. If you really want to be effective in that transition period, you've got to start thinking about it before the election. However, it doesn't have to be high profile and it doesn't have to be something that you're going to send press releases out on. But a good way to approach it would be to figure out who's the person that very likely might be your chief of staff if you're elected. And say to that person, "What I want you to do is to begin to take the time to look really at three areas."

Consider the challenges and benefits to a transition process of living with the agenda that you've set the promises that you've made and comment a little bit on the missing element in this answer, which is Congress. Focus on key areas that he wants to implement as part of his agenda in appointing people to the different positions in the cabinet. He's got to make sure that the people he appoints are going to be willing to advance these goals. Once you sit down with the cabinet and say, "The President wants to go in this direction." The cabinet members must come together and be completely supportive of that position.

When you're chairman in the House, you've got to deal with all of these major fiefdoms that are called chairmanships to try to figure out what they want, what they're after, you really have to compromise with them and eventually you get enough people to support it and you get it through. When you're in the executive branch, President says, "This is what I want to do in the budget." Then you tell the cabinet member that's it and there is no discussion, no compromise. You suddenly realize the difference between power on Capitol Hill and power in the executive branch and what it meant.

It is very important as president to identify the two or three things you want to accomplish in the first 100 days. Even though it may not happen, you want to start thinking about what are those two or three things that I really want to accomplish, so at the end of those 100 days, I can show them to the American people.

What Neustadt prepared for Reagan was of a very different order from the memos written for Kennedy. Neustadt was part of the Kennedy team in 1960, the governing insider. In 1980, he was the contemplative outsider. In that role, he reviewed the problems of staffing the White House. Predictably, he began with advice to build a structure suited to the president's "preferred way of doing work."

Following that orientation, Neustadt provided advice regarding mismatches in the operating styles of staff, the effects of how the Carter administration staffed the White House, changes for the sake of change, cabinet management and use, the association of foreign and domestic perspectives, and the prevention of staff growth (possibly producing "high-level loose cannons," as in Watergate). The lessons are richly illustrated with historical examples of the successes and failures of White House staff operations. And, of course, the point is not to provide engrossing gossip about a past administration. It is rather to encourage thought about how best to promote good advice for the president.

The extent to which Baker absorbed these specific lessons of history is uncertain. No mention is made of Neustadt's memo in the various volumes on the organization of the Reagan presidency. Yet Neustadt's central maxim was clearly followed: Organize the White House staff to suit the needs and style of the incumbent. Reagan and Kennedy were both highly staff-dependent presidents, though for different reasons: Reagan for having set goals, then delegating; Kennedy for having extended his reach with generalists like himself. Their transitions into office were among the more successful in recent decades.

Whoever is elected, there is an instinctive honeymoon period in which, you know, even if the Congress belongs to the other party, there is going to be the sense of, "Okay, we have a new president. This is an opportunity for everyone to try to work together for the sake of the country." You can use that opportunity to try to get some things done when the country is with you. Because your polls are usually high, the public is with you, there's a sense of renewal and there's a sense that we can move in the right direction.

To some extent the process works against you, because one of the first things you have to do as the President is put a budget together. You need to say to the American people, "Look, what I want to do is I want to accomplish these issues." And use that as your theme. Because, in the end, the American people want to know that you have your act together and they want to know what is it that you want to accomplish.

The failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion and its causes are brilliantly arrayed in a new book by Peter Wyden, The Bay of Pigs (Simon & Schuster, 1979), which ought to be required reading for transition teams. It is distinctly a transition story; Kennedy, who blamed himself, with reason, came to regard it so. One of the things this episode taught Kennedy was his vulnerability when military or diplomatic advice, and foreign intelligence, came at him independent of domestic and political perspectives. Lacking magic to turn McNamara, Rusk, or Bundy into a Hopkins, Kennedy devised a substitute. His brother-the attorney general, formerly campaign manager-and Sorensen, his Domestic-adviser-cum-speechwriter, were added to the inner circle with which JFK henceforth reviewed all major diplomatic and defense decisions. (He also added his secretary of the Treasury, Douglas Dillon, a friend and Eisenhower's undersecretary of state to boot).

By the time of Clinton's 1992 campaign, Neustadt had seen several presidents come and go since he wrote his original memos. His former student, Sen. Albert Gore, Jr., was on the ticket with Clinton, and one of his colleagues at Harvard, Robert B. Reich, was a close friend and the future secretary of labor. It was in response to Reich that Neustadt propounded ten "lessons" for the prospective transition, forwarded to Clinton in August 1992. One is struck by the greater urgency in appointments recommended by Neustadt here compared with his advice to Kennedy. Also apparent is the greater sensitivity to institutional developments that made it even more imperative that an "out-of-towner" organize carefully. The clear implication of Neustadt's lessons is that the press, Congress, the bureaucracy, and the presidential branch had all become significantly more active during the transition period, thereby increasing the challenges to the new president. Finally, Neustadt advises not to repeat several of the mistakes of Jimmy Carter. Given the similarities in their political circumstances and experiences as southern governors, this guidance was appropriate. As it happened, however, much of Neustadt's counsel was ignored and mistakes of the past were, in fact, repeated.

The other memos in this set are unique as transition documents. The first to Reed Hundt, a lawyer friend of Al Gore, addresses the case of the vice president (specifically Neustadt's former student). In it, Neustadt identifies the "special vantage point" of the vice president as the president's campaign and election partner. Therefore if the president has the wit to acknowledge this advantage, he will have a second mind through which to pass the issues of the day. This mind will have been tempered too by the special political experience of running for the presidency. No one else can perform that role, and therefore the vice president needs to nurture it

The last memos in this collection direct attention to the role of the first lady, a subject not usually considered as a transition issue apart from the personal adjustments made within the family. The case of Hillary Rodham Clinton was special, however, because voters were promised "two for the price of one." The prospective first lady had been actively involved in policy issues during her husband's service as governor of Arkansas, both within the state and nationally as president of the Children's Defense Fund. Thus, most analysts believed that Hillary Clinton would play a direct role in the new administration.

When you've been Vice President and served in the administration you clearly have a head start as far as the kind of positions and people that you want to put in place. It gives you the experience; it gives you the background, particularly on foreign affairs. On foreign affairs, for example, you really have the edge in terms of experience, knowing the people, knowing the issues and knowing what you want to deal with in regard to foreign policy.

Once a Vice President, even in the old administration, is elected, there are inherently new players that you're going to want to bring into play. The reality is that if you're President now, you want to bring in your own team. And your own team, frankly, wants to be your own team. Friendly takeovers may on the surface look like a friendly way to go, underneath, it could get pretty rough.

If the next president really wants to get his agenda achieved, if he wants to be a successful president, he has got to be able to bring his issues home to the American people. When you're fighting with the news, you want to make sure it's your sound bite that's on that evening or that night and you have to deliberately plan that.

If you're [a Democrat] and you're confronting a Republican Congress, you may have to think very differently about what those first 100 days are going to look like and what you want to do. The best result for both the new President and for the Congress is to get things done. You're better off when you get things done than if you simply confront each other. The reality is that in today's world, there is a war going on between the executive and legislative branch. And that war basically bogs down every initiative that either the executive or the legislative branch wants.

Try to build bridges to the Congress in a meaningful way, not just in rhetoric, but in a meaningful way. And try to really create a very different atmosphere than what we've had, or if he will continue on the current course of partisanship.

It is incumbent on any new president to try to confront that challenge perhaps first and foremost, to try to build new bridges to whoever is running the Congress because the atmosphere is so poisoned right now. And part of the problem is that it's poisoned because of things that go beyond just personalities. It is the ingredients of politics today.

A new president is really going to have to take on that challenge to create a better relationship with the individuals that are on the Hill. In the end this is a human process. If somebody trusts you in terms of what you say, then you can build a very different relationship with people.

Two rules of thumb in designating personal staff: First, appoint men only to jobs for which the President-elect, himself, feels an immediate and continuing need, a need he has defined in his own mind, and can at once define for them. If the need is immediate but not continuing, offer a "consultantship," or put the man in a department and borrow him back. Second, give appointees titles that square with the jobs to be done and choose no titles without thinking of their bureaucratic connotations in the outgoing regime.

Designating Cabinet Officers. There is no operating reason why cabinet officers and heads of major agencies need be designated immediately after election. One does not need cabinet officers in order to get moving toward a fast start after January 20. Indeed, there is advantage in holding off on most cabinet appointments until staff and working groups are launched; cabinet members then would have a frame-work to fit into and could not wander off on their own. As a rule of thumb: defer cabinet and major agency designations until early December. A possible exception is the secretaryship of state. A second possible exception is the cabinet post, if any, where an incumbent would be retained as a gesture of bipartisanship. In choosing cabinet officers (and heads of major agencies), the President-elect will naturally consider the usual criteria of geographic, party, and interest-group "representativeness." First is competitive balance among major differences in policy outlook. Second is the chance for useful reorientation of a department's role with a change in its secretary's traditional orientation. Third is the effect on long-run organizational objectives-and options-inherent in the personalities and interests of particular appointees.

Organizing for Appointments below Cabinet Rank. This is an area in which the President-elect and his whole staff could easily get bogged down at no profit to themselves. For self-protection, three things should be done soon after Election Day:

Installing the "Shadow Government" in Washington. Very soon after Election Day, the President-elect will want to decide how fast and how formally-and in what facilities at whose expense-he wants his staff and cabinet designees, and ad hoc working groups in Washington. This automatically involves decision also on the timing of vacations and of reconnaissance trips abroad by presidential designees, or by the President-elect. Shall they (or he) survey the free world? And when must they be back?

Preparing the Inaugural Address. It will help to have a notion of what is to follow before spending much time on this introduction. It will also help to wait until one knows what international and economic conditions to expect by January 20.

Arranging the Physical Takeover. (a) Arranging White House office space and Executive Office Building space. (b) Determining what physical changes (temporary partitions and the like) have been made in the White House offices and at Old State, and deciding what the Eisenhower people should be asked to undo before January 20. (This is more serious than it may seem). (c) Deciding what personal facilities traditionally available for the President should be in readiness by January 20 and requesting that appropriate arrangements be made. These facilities include: automobiles, helicopters, planes, Camp David, two motor cruisers, and the yacht (in moth balls since 1953 [and now privately owned/contracted]). (d) Deciding on arrangements for inauguration ceremony, inaugural parade, and inaugural balls. Arrangements include invitation lists and tickets.

The more negative the campaign, the meaner it gets, the deeper the wounds. The more statesmanlike the campaign, the better chance you have to pull it together.

Woodrow Wilson's first cabinet meeting

Cabinet meetings can most usefully serve other purposes. Formal meetings like this one will be called for several purposes: (1) Background information on which the whole group should be briefed so that all members of the administration have a common understanding. Today's briefings are an example. (2) Plans or ideas which the entire group should know about or on which group reactions are wanted. (3) Administrative matters of common concern to all department heads. "Proposals for action" over "what is wrong," "personal and public loyalty," presidential control of the agenda, and limiting attendance. "Let us not waste time" was essentially advice to make cabinet meetings purposeful and to avoid a routine of meetings for their own sake.

 

Harry Truman's Cabinet

Arranging Initial Cabinet and NSC Meetings. It would be well to confine early cabinet meetings to department heads of cabinet rank, along with the President's executive assistant, and to have only such agenda as the President may choose in consultation with his personal staff.

 

George W. Bush Cabinet Meeting

The whole process of putting a budget together, having to stay on issue and work with the legislative branch are very important ingredients to the ability to be President of the United States. The problem side of is that sometimes if you haven't been in Washington and you don't understand Washington and you think that somehow you can do the same things you did in a state government in Washington, then you start to go off the wrong trail and often off a cliff.

Sometimes what happens, is that the President gets this feeling that dealing with the press, dealing with the Congress will be an easy process. And it's not. It's different. It's very much a whole different atmosphere. You can't assume that the way you dealt with the legislature is the way you deal with the Congress. It's a different world. Congress is tougher to deal with; you've got greater egos on Capitol Hill. They care about their jurisdictions. They are power syndromes, unto themselves. The Senate is generally, a little easier to work out compromises with. Dealing with the press is different. These people are tougher to deal with. They're much more critical, much more knowledgeable about the issues that you deal with.

Probably the biggest problem that often happens, whether a Congressman, Senator gets elected, is that you've had campaign people out there. They have been working, passing out balloons, literature; doing the advance work in your campaign. They're very loyal and capable; they've worked together to get you elected. Once you're elected there is this automatic high that they think, "Clearly, I'm going to go to the White House." Or, "I'm going to go to this agency or department and I'm going to get a big job in Washington." They feel they deserve this because they have worked loyally in the campaign. It is very dangerous to assume that because somebody is a great campaign worker that that person can go into the White House and operate the responsibilities that are in the White House. I'm not saying it's impossible. There are some good people that can make that transition. But as president, you have to first and foremost be thinking, "I've got to get the most qualified people in these jobs who know what they're doing and are experienced in what they're doing." Because you hit the ground running, you become president and the day after you're inaugurated, you're going to depend on that team in the White House to know what the hell they're doing. They need to know what Governors need to be talked to, what bases the new administration has to touch. They must know whom on Capitol Hill you have to talk to and what process you have to put in place in order to deal with all of those different constituencies out there that supported you. You need to have that team in place and it has to be a first rate team that has experience in their jobs and that are grown-ups.

The Kennedy Cabinet is sworn in during an East Room ceremony in 1961

The first clue is if the President says he wants to have a cabinet government-- that is, he's going to appoint the cabinet and worry about the White House second. That's a clear sign of the road to perdition. And both Carter, and to a lesser degree, Clinton, thought the cabinet government was a good thing and got around to appointing the White House staff very late and it hurt them badly in the first 100 days. Obviously, you have to have a cabinet, but the White House staff and the people who process the cabinet level appointments have to be in place early on and they have to stop all their in fighting about who's going to get what office in the West Wing. That all has to be over by the time Election Day hits.

The first three memos offer a coherent set of guidelines for taking charge, all posited in the context of the president-elect having decided what his presidency is about. These three, "Organizing the Transition," "Staffing the President-Elect," and "Cabinet Departments: Some Things to Keep in Mind," provide topical advice, historical experience, attention to the Eisenhower operation, and reminders of what should continue and why. While comprehensive and instructive, the memos emphasize the choices that have to be made. Neustadt never forgets who it is that will be the president.

In the first memo (September 15, 1960), Neustadt provides a review of basic issues associated with the transition: the pressures of meeting expectations in the first hundred days; deciding what the message of the new administration will be; selecting the most trusted aides for the White House; designating the cabinet; organizing the process for subcabinet appointments; initiating liaison to and reassuring the bureaucracy, Congress, the outgoing administration, and the press; arranging to move into the White House and the government; and preparing for the first cabinet meetings and the inaugural. It truly is a memo for all time, ever sensitive to who the president is and what he wants to do, as well as citing caveats regarding preinaugural traps. It is no wonder that Senator Kennedy wanted more after reading this first briefing paper.

The second memo (October 30, 1960) directs attention to staffing needs. Neustadt begins by stressing the singularity of a president's needs. He repeats points made in the first memo: "A President's needs for staff are bound to be different in many ways from a Senator's, or even from a Candidate's. But your needs in the Presidency will also differ from Eisenhower's." He then defines the challenge for the president-elect in fashioning his staff: Clarify your needs first, because "you are the only person you can count on to be thinking about what helps you." Then consider the needs others have for presidential help.

Notable in this second missive is attention to the experience of other presidents. Sensing that Kennedy preferred the more collegial staff of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Neustadt explained that "a collegial staff has to be managed; competition has to be audited. To run a staff in Roosevelt's style imposes heavy burdens." As reinforcement, Neustadt attached summaries of Roosevelt's approaches to staffing the White House and the Bureau of the Budget. The first of these summaries remains one of the most succinct and sophisticated treatments of the Roosevelt style of governing ever written. It was, understandably, welcomed by Kennedy for the lessons it contained.

The third memo in this collection (November 3, 1960) focuses on cabinet departments. Neustadt clarifies that his purpose is not to be involved in various political criteria for appointments. Rather, consistent with his overarching theme, he identifies factors that "bear upon your own ability as President to conserve your freedom of action and to guard your reputation." Neustadt advises Kennedy, a Democrat, to consider naming a Republican to head the Treasury Department, an action later taken by Kennedy with the appointment of Douglas Dillon. Also highlighted is the Department of Justice, where "the full utility . . . as a presidential asset has not often been perceived by sitting Presidents." Failure to be so attentive can cause (and has caused) the department to be "a passive drag or a decided liability."

Two other memos, the seventh (December 20, 1960) and twelfth (January 26, 1961) in this collection, also deal with cabinet matters. The seventh warns Kennedy about designating "cabinet assistants," because expectations may then quickly develop that Eisenhower's cabinet system would be adopted. Neustadt counsels against immediate acceptance of procedures already in place as cabinet secretaries orient themselves to their new jobs, pointing out that "vested interests in the present Cabinet system would spring up in each of your Departments." His advice to Kennedy can be summarized this way: Do not let the past determine your future.

Consistent with the collegial style of White House organization, the fourth (December 3, 1960) and fifth (December 7, 1960) memos advise Kennedy to be cautious in designating titles for his staff. Titles should be "unspecific" so as to permit shifting assignments and to prevent "automatic formation of a clientele with which the man is openly identified." As with the first three, the eleventh memo (January 18, 1961) is a set of recommendations for all time. No one can quite know what it is like to be president in advance of serving (though some, vice presidents who become presidents, are likely to have a strong sense of the experience), so this memo directs attention to those early weeks when the president is taking a crash course on his job and during which time "flaps" are inevitable. Neustadt identifies the types of likely emergencies and how they will present themselves, along with advice on who should handle them and how.

You want to be sympathetic to them. You want to make sure they have an ear, but if you try to play this balance of putting somebody in from the right wing over here and somebody from the left wing over here, that's just a dangerous process. Focus first and foremost on the basic capabilities of the people that you want put on your team.

Neustadt also advised presidential candidates who lost. His memo to Paul Brountas, a Michael Dukakis aide, is included here primarily because it treats the important matter of transition planning during the campaign. It is worth noting that the memo was written in late May when Dukakis was definitely competitive with George H. W. Bush in the polls. In the memo, Neustadt advised that those engaged in transition planning be integrated into the campaign, not "sitting on the side-lines as a post-election planner." He provided historical examples, noting the success of Baker because he was a part of the 1980 Reagan campaign, not in the least a sideliner. Neustadt also portrayed the tensions between those working in the campaign and those planning for governing after. These stresses are certain to occur; they are amplified if the planners are set off from the campaigners, as with the Carter and Clinton planning efforts.

Neustadt adds to his earlier writings about transitions in his last essay, "Advising the Advisers." He highlights three hazards for transition advisers that have not received due attention in the past. First, advisers may find themselves in a time warp. Neustadt recounts the changes in congressional expectations of a president and of the revolution in media and technology. These developments have changed the presidency and have opened up new possibilities for presidents that cannot be recognized merely by relying on old experience. Second, Neustadt indicates the importance of seeking advice from the people in the administration that is leaving office and the tendency of incoming aides to ignore that advice. "The insights of thoughtful incumbents, still in office but already slated to leave, hence in a reflective mood, are an invaluable source of timely information on the way the government works, in a time span bound to be of relevance for their successors-whether or not the latter understand that at the start," he writes. Third, Neustadt worries about the lack of institutional memory in the White House. There is a tendency to forget past White House organization and ignore what did and did not work. Neustadt counsels new administrations to study past practice, "but do not trust it more than at the most two presidential generations back, unless the oldsters can attest that they were personally present at an earlier creation!"

The central task is that of organizing a Presidency to achieve the goals and purposes of the incumbent. Advice should be Judged by the President's purpose, style, and perception of the job.

The Challenges of a President suddenly responsible for an emerging administration, with dozens of appointees, themselves learning their jobs, acting in his name. Meeting expectations in the first 100 days; deciding what the message will be; selecting the most trusted aides-in the White House and within the executive; designating the cabinet; organizing the process for subcabinet appointments; initiating liaison to and reassuring the bureaucracy, Congress, the outgoing administration, and the press; arranging to move into the White House and the government; and preparing for the first cabinet meetings and the inaugural. "A collegial staff has to be managed; competition has to be audited. To run a staff in Roosevelt's style imposes heavy burdens."

Do not let the past determine your future.

Titles should be "unspecific" so as to permit shifting assignments and to prevent "automatic formation of a clientele with which the man is openly identified." Build structure suited to "the man's preferred way of doing work." There it was again: Know the President; understand his style; make him effective in that context. Neustadt's central maxim: Organize the White House staff to suit the needs and style of the incumbent. Reagan and Kennedy were both highly staff-dependent Presidents.

Other Guidance for an Incoming President. Know what it is you want to accomplish. Do not make change for its own sake. Do not accept what is there if it does not suit your purposes. Take help from those who are leaving if they are willing to give it.

Guidelines for the transition period between election and inaugural: Postpone whatever is postponable in the mechanics of administration building. Put off the novelties that have not been thought through. Concentrate upon the things that are immediately relevant to showing real effective-ness on and after January 20. And in the doing of those things, Keep this objective uppermost. It is the key objective for the weeks after November 8 [Election Day].

The staff you put together now, in the days after election, must be regarded as the core of your official staff, at least during your early months in office. It is trouble enough to build a staff group for the President-elect out of a campaign organization. It would be a waste of time-and you won't have the time-to shake your organization up again as you cease being President-elect and become President.

Program Development after Inauguration. These three steps-completing the first message, amending the budget, getting longer-range studies started-will be major items of concern for the President's first weeks in office. They rep-resent, really, a late stage in "transition." Like everything before, this stage should be set in awareness of possible complications from abroad.

 

Coping with the President's Own Operating Style. Every administration reshapes inherited White House structure and procedure to meet the man's own preferred way of doing work. But up to now none has succeeded equally and simultaneously in compensating for the limitations native to the man's own style.

Compensating for Mismatches in the Styles of Others. Poor interlock of operating styles, like Rusk's with Kennedy's, may be inevitable when men who have not previously worked together are thrown together. The best way to treat that is by diagnosis and reform or resignation, not by ad hoc adjustment without consciousness of causes.

Filling Jobs Because They're There. Most White House posts have histories that do not show on their surface. Many had their origins in felt needs of past Presidents now met by other means. You cannot fully know your needs until you have experience. Once filled, jobs are hard to drop. Think twice about the changes for the sake of change (or of publicity). Incidentally, regarding that consolidated Office of Administration, grab hold of it and get it looked at closely in your interest.

Roosevelt increasingly found council meetings boring: large numbers doing show-and-tell while eyeing one another to see who'd be first in line for private talk with him when they broke up. Truman came in critical of FDR's disorder and set out to govern "through" the cabinet, meeting frequently for serious work. In eighteen months his disillusion with the cabinet as a council was complete. The egoism and parochialism of most members startled him. His later cabinet meetings were increasingly pro forma, and he did most of his business with individual members and small groups tailored to matters at hand. In the process, Truman grew quite philosophic about the parochialism of department heads, granting them to be as much the servants of congressional committees as of him. Successive Presidents since Ike's time have had comparable experiences. By all accounts, Kennedy and Nixon may have been the most impatient, Johnson the most overbearing, Ford the most attentive, and Carter the most courteous. But for them all the cabinet meeting came to be a duty, not a pleasure, nor a source of collective wisdom, nor even a spur to consensus. Smaller groups on separate subjects were preferred in every case, in Nixon's the smaller the better.

In the real world, people do need to talk about transitions. One of the big problems for Bill Clinton was that he didn't.  They didn't deal with it effectively. They had this very close-knit group, which were Warren Christopher, Vernon Jordan, Mac McLarty, Hillary and Al Gore. And they met all the time at the mansion, in the kitchen, but almost by superstition not effectively enough until after the election.  And we all know the result, which was a disastrous transition in that they had this diversity goal, which is not a bad goal, but it seemed to supersede everything else. And the cabinet selection preceded the White House staff selection.

Transition Funding. The two million dollars appropriated for a transition for a pre-inauguration transition team in 1976 has been a mixed blessing. What it has done is create an expectation that you're going to have this enormous transition team apparatus that basically is a bridge for the campaign staff between the end of the election and the beginning of the administration.

There are two transitions. There is a transition before the Cabinet is selected and then there's a real transition when the cabinet is selected. When the cabinet comes in, they just trash almost all the work that's been done before, unless they happen to pick as their chief of staff somebody who was on one of these teams. People recognize this is a vulnerable, somewhat risky period for the American system. On the whole, it brings out the best in people. It's serious business to run this country. To try doing it all in 11 weeks is a bit hubristic. But there really has to be an understanding between the campaign staff and the planning staff up front. The person who is running the planning staff has got to take him or her out of the action. It's got to be like a Clark Clifford who is in there to help get the President prepared and will run the staff, but has no personal ambitions of his or her own.

As you enter the White House, be sure that you have clear objectives. They should be relatively few in number and capable of being achieved, particularly during the so-called honeymoon period at the start of your administration. The planning should begin during the transition, because the first impressions that a President and a White House staff make are going to last a long time.

There have to be relatively clear lines of authority, and the principal White House assistants must be selected with great care. Otherwise, a vacuum is always going to be filled, usually by a lot of people coming from the campaign who feel that they are owed positions in the White House or who may feel that they deserve more authority than they have been given. Carefully selecting the staff and making clear the structure can do a lot at the start of the White House to provide a smooth incoming transition.

The President should determine early the role of the cabinet. The quality, the discipline, the supervision, and the focus of the staff that supports that President of the United States can largely determine the success or failure of a President. The President should know that no matter how well he plans or how carefully he organizes, there are still going to be surprises, disappointments, and crises that can never be anticipated.

The point is not to arbitrarily cut staff just for the sake of cuts. Carter's people tried that with some ill effects. Rather, it is to reserve space for later, deliberate growth, meeting priority needs as you experience them without markedly enlarging present numbers. For these are already vulnerable to Nixon's troubles, and Carter's.

The Office of Legal Counsel is the institutional memory for all of the legal and ethical pitfalls that any administration can run into.  They are really the brains and the institutional memory for all of the major trouble spots in the White House.

Such things suggest to me three rules of thumb for transition planning: First, try to master what's there before tearing it down. This means quick, quiet study, even policies, both before Election Day and especially right after. Second, staffing and procedural innovations in the White House and Executive Office should be looked at hard before being abandoned or arbitrarily changed. Third, especially in media and congressional relations and most especially in national security affairs, many choices should be made no sooner than the President-elect acquires the experience for informed, personal judgment. He won't have it at the start. This counsels hedging some bets.

1. Organize the core of the White House staff by or before Thanksgiving and set them to superintend the preparatory work on things the President-elect himself has to do or approve first. They desperately need to gain experience before January 20 in working with him and with each other in the new roles they are assuming.

2. Appoint the bulk of department heads by mid-December and get them to D.C. in touch with outgoing counterparts and civil servants. Give them qualified initiative on assistant secretaries and below, subject to White House veto. (Doing it the other way gives the White House control but for what? In time they all go native anyhow). But make it an active veto; pushing the personnel operation into high gear, with an adequate fence around it. Beware congressional aides since each has an agenda item all his own, or his boss's. Keep actual personnel screening and reviewing outside Washington. The "fence" can be in Washington.

3. Do not appoint "task forces" except on substantive issues of immediate concern where advice is really needed.

4. Return most of the federal funds [for the transition] to the Treasury (reduce the debt a bit), thus avoiding temptations to spend it on campaigners, raising their hopes for permanent employment, creating a prima facie case for that, thereby unleashing intense jockeying for advantageous access to agency payrolls.

5. Decide the fields on which you're going to be "bipartisan"- e.g., jobs, investment, taxes? -

6. Keep the President-elect out of Washington, except for frequent visits, but put him and his staff someplace the press corps will enjoy (Nixon: New York; JFK: Palm Beach, New York, Hyannis). Not Plains, Georgia. Don't play softball with reporters and insist on winning.

7. Appoint a visible and trustworthy liaison with the outgoing administration. Surround him with sufficient staff in Washington for press and personnel to serve the fence function, keeping the multitudes out of the real staff's hair. Have him make sure the out-going White House orders what you need from executive agencies for interim management (including space, transport, FBI clearances, White House passes, etc.).

8. Be immensely courteous to the outgoing White House but don't agree to share responsibility for anything.

9. Don't prematurely announce actions the President-elect can't actually take before 12 noon on January 20. Remember Carter's $50 tax cut: announced in December, withdrawn after inaugural!

10. As December turns into January, fill most of all the subordinate posts in the White House itself. There are too many there, no doubt, but it'll be a year or more before the President-elect knows which he'd dispense with and why. The time to reorganize and shed staff is immediately after reelection (as FDR and Nixon found).

The VP offers the additional asset that he can't be fired, which guarantees a certain independence of judgment (unlike the White House staff, which tends to be more royalist than the king). The VP, if he wants to-and has associates as his eyes and ears in NSC, cabinet councils, OMB, and Capitol Hill-is better placed than any outside politician to be abreast of the detail whenever his advice is either sought or volunteered. And no one but the President, repeatedly insistent, keeps the VP in the loop on his decisions. Alas, what history suggests is that the President too frequently forgets, or never grasps, that his behavior is the key to the other's performance. In my understanding this is a role wholly consistent with the sort of help a President needs sorely but almost never gets-namely responsible, informed advice on choices across the board of policy, personnel, and politics, from a perspective as wide and electoral as his need be, and focused on his agenda. A President's desk is no respecter of distinctions between administrative and political, economic and social, domestic and foreign, military and civil. I cannot overstress the gap between a President's necessitous perspective, stemming from his job, prospects, place in history, and that of almost all others, stemming from theirs.

In advising on presidential transitions, risks for the adviser can be summarized as ignorance compounded by inhibitions and haste. While ignorance can mean not knowing, it can also mean not comprehending what in some sense one may know. "Not knowing" has been characteristic of all transition studies that purport to advise nominees of both major political parties. There are, of course, some general pieces of information that affect both, like expiring legislation, or jobs on Schedule C, or White House salaries, office space, clearance procedures, et cetera. And White House history is certainly important for both, though rarely covered in enough depth by such studies.

The hazards for those to whom advice is offered, the advisees, so to speak, are not the same as those for advisers, although in some respects quite similar. What haunts the advisees are haste, hubris, and newness-the sort of newness generating the incomprehension that is fueled by inexperience. Haste is a hazard for the objects of advice-for Presidents-elect and their immediate associates-no less than for would-be advisers. The eleven weeks between election and inaugural are eased, somewhat, since Kennedy's time, by an additional three weeks until the annual messages, which now go up in February, not January. And Congress customarily goes out of session, after convening January 3, until the message season. But cutting against those easements are the complications now attendant on presidential appointments, thanks to the Ethics in Government Act, elaborate procedures, and too many lawyers. Secular changes in media coverage add to the complications. So do federal dollars for transition staffs and "teams." Time is still woefully short in which to build a White House staff, select a cabinet, shape an initial legislative program, review the budget, reassure civil servants, connect with congressional leaders, woo the press corps, and present a public image different from-more national, less partisan-that in the run-up to election. Haste is unavoidable. So is hubris, at least in the form of arrogance and innocence Combined. The arrogance, at best, consists of thinking that "we won, so we can, while they didn't and couldn't," amplified by almost certain overestimation of the Presidency's potency. Complicating tendencies toward hubris in those terms is the inevitable inexperience, which makes so many of the choices facing Presidents-elect virtually incomprehensible to them. Inexperience and the incomprehension it engenders are rendered the more dangerous for newly elected Presidents and their close aides by unfamiliarity with press relations as embodied in the present White House press corps.

The Presidential Transition Act was passed in 1963 partly because of the financial difficulties transition teams encountered.

Here are some basic reminders to the next President-elect for delivery to him on the day after the election, regardless of which party is successful this year....

Remember you are not now a candidate. Now it's not enough to give a great speech, or to raise a profound question, or to point with alarm to some oncoming peril. From now on, that's not enough. You have to have answers. You have to run the show, and from now on, every word you speak is spoken to multiple audiences all around the country and all around the world, and you must exercise much greater caution and provide much greater depth when you speak. Your obligation now is not merely to your party, but to all Americans.

Remember you are not yet President. Very important that during the next several weeks you do nothing and say nothing that will undermine the incumbent President and confuse the world as to who is in charge. Under our Constitution, only the incumbent is in charge until January 20 of next year. During this time you should not seek to advise the incumbent President, either privately or publicly. You should not endorse what his plans are, much less attack what his plans are, even though many of them are long-range and going to affect you and perhaps impair your discretion in the White House. There is one exception, and that is on personnel matter. You can, if you wish, ask the President of the United States to impose a freeze on federal branch employment, or a hold on additional nominations, or a halt to transferring people from political Schedule C positions into permanent civil service positions. Stay away from Washington. There's a real value to being out of town. He ought to carefully schedule his appearances, and he ought to build up to the inauguration. There's a sense of timing, a sense of availability, and inauguration is the key time, and the President ought to be very careful in hoarding his visibility up until that particular day.

Remember you are not about to be a king. In organizing government, which you must do during these next weeks, do not make the mistake of concentrating all executive authority in the White House. Select wise Cabinet members and then give them some authority, give them some discretion, give them some area to demonstrate their abilities for leadership. Respect the federal career service. They are beholden to the public trust, and it would do well for you to trust them. Congressmen of both parties under our system are going to play an important role in your next four years, and you should be consulting during this time. The world is a whole lot more complexes when you're inside the White House looking out than it is before, when you were on the outside looking in.

Remember you will not be President-elect for long. You have 10 weeks and three days, 73 days, to do what no human being could accomplish in twice that amount of time. There's simply too much to do and too little time to do it. Do not rush decisions with long-term consequences that you will have to live with for these next years to come. They may be some of the most important decisions that you will ever make as President. Time is your most precious commodity during these 73 days. Do not waste it on the insignificant or the irrelevant or on decisions that are in fact postponeable. Ensure that you are not contributing to that delay in the appointment process. Make certain that your initial screening, selection, nomination is done as expeditiously and early as possible and that includes compiling names and background information, before the election.

Exercise caution in your campaign rhetoric and in making deals even while the campaign is at its height. The transition goes some months beyond inauguration day, begins some months before Election Day. During the campaign avoid making unrealistic, big money promises, uninformed national security pledges, or unwarranted attacks on civil servants.

The one thing that is absolutely essential to have in places the apparatus for change: As you begin to assemble the people you want around you, loyalty is the one overriding trait that must be in place before anything else. Never have anybody around you in the White House or in the Cabinet or in any post that doesn't understand with great clarity the art of politics and how the Congress works.

A President must infuse the people around him with his convictions, because a President without convictions is a man who will be right only by accident.

Initiate telephone calls of appreciation to key people, both in the Congress and otherwise across the country, leaders who have helped you in one way or another to be elected. Set up a group to supervise responses to telegrams from foreign leaders. Meet with leaders of the campaign to confirm arrangements for closing the campaign down.

Assign authority to a very limited number of people, with staff aides to manage the transition, a transition coordinator, a director of the transition, and a press secretary, followed shortly thereafter by congressional liaison, as principal transition aides.

The President, during the transition, sets the climate for how he would like his presidency to be perceived. Perceptions are extremely important. They set the tone at that point. David Border and others will be writing during that 77 days about whether this is a surefooted President who seems to accept the leadership position gracefully, or whether this is a President who is stumbling into office.

If any formal planning for the timing of announcements for appointees is being done, it is being done by the most trusted adviser, the Warren Christopher of the transition, who will not leak a secret if his life depended on it.

Make contact with the General Services Administration: they have the money and the logistical support of the transition team.

Get acquainted with the Director of the FBI rather rapidly and get his support and cooperation in the clearance investigations, the background investigations of your people, and also particularly important is to ask the FBI Director that if they come across a snag with anybody that they're investigating would he please let you, the Transition Director know directly when that happens, that you would much prefer to find it out from him, than through the pages of the Washington Post. You cannot waste November, December, and January for the clearance process, because there will be a bottleneck and inevitably things will slow down.

Establish that close contact with the outgoing transition team. There is a tremendous interest on the part of the press in what's going on with the new administration. You have a lot of reporters and journalists who have covered the campaign for, at that point, probably six to eight months, and all of the sudden it stops. They have to have something to write about, so there will be all kinds of interest in who's going to be appointed.

Have someone who's in charge of administration and finance. Very important that you have those kinds of accounting systems. If there's anything that can give you a bad time, it's not having the proper accounting set up right from the start so you can keep track of the funds.

Legislative liaison. Right from the start, it is very important, and one of the ways in which the President set the climate is establishing immediate rapport with the members of Congress, both of his own party and also of the other party. Another thing that is very important with all these different things going on--the executive branch liaison teams, the legislative liaison, the press section talking to the press and giving them as much information as is appropriate

Development of a strategic plan for the first 180 days of the presidency. It is exactly six months between the 20th of January when the President is inaugurated and the middle of August when Congress traditionally takes their summer recess, and it is that honeymoon period that is very critical for the President to get his program through Congress.

One person assigned to develop a strategic plan, to combine the policy recommendations, to schedule when appointments would be made and milestones and deadlines for appointments, to bring in the communications aspects, when there should be presidential speeches so that we have a general outline of what should be done during the first 180 days. The strategic plan brings together the various aspects not only of the transition, but also the future aspects of the White House and the presidency itself and how you could integrate these various parts: what the role of Cabinet members would be, what the role of the various departments and the various sections in the White House would be, and also the people that had to be contacted, the liaisons that had to be established in order to bring together the primary policy objectives and have them accomplished by the time of the congressional recess in August . Schedule the announcement of Cabinet members in two or three different groups. The purpose of that is so you don't have a lot of leaking, a lot of piecemeal announcements along the way,

Adapt the people and the organization and the policies to the personality and the desires of this incoming President. You have to operate from belief and conviction and from your campaign stances. People are policy, and you must make cuts on who is going to get the key plum jobs.

Choose your key White House staff before you bother with the Cabinet, so that the staff can begin to learn how to relate to each other.

Try to position some staff--or, alternatively, Cabinet--to have a perspective almost as broad as the President's will have to be. Start by filling at least the central White House jobs pretty much as is, as you inherit them, or close to that.

Save your big innovations for the end of your first term, before you start your second term when you know what the hell you're doing. People who reorganize the White House before they have the slightest idea of what they're doing get themselves in considerable trouble. Next, if you must economize, or must symbolize economy, eliminate jobs for policy wonks --lawyers--not good first-rate clerical people and messengers.

Cushion the Cabinet members against the shocking discovery that most of them are not the principal advisers to the President, and are not going to be, and never will be, not since the White House staff has come into a mature existence.

It's worthwhile to be quite tender with the White House press corps during the transition. There's not going to be another time when public attention is so focused on first impressions of the new President as in the period December-January-February. There's no overemphasizing the importance of looking different, looking presidential.

Chief of Staff and NSC adviser and those are obviously key, but the personnel operation as well as the legal counsel's operation are very important. The degree of oversight that is provided by higher levels within the campaign organization is very important. Early decisions are helpful, not just thinking about people, not just thinking about appointments, but also about process: how these individuals who are appointed to the White House staff fit together in a decision-making process that will come to bear once the President is in office.

Heed warning signs early. Health care reform, gays in the military.

Media visibility. The press is paying more attention to what's going on. Furthermore, transition successes and failures are taken as harbingers of managerial and political competence.

Transitions are also times for the President to think about himself, the transition of the person to the office. What are his strengths and weaknesses as a decision-maker? How is the White House in that environment different from Sacramento or Little Rock? How is it different from Austin, or even how is it different from the Vice President's office down the hall? How does the staff and those decision-making processes need to be tailored to this President?

Transitions are a time to think about management. It's a time to set the tone. Presidents-elect, as well as Presidents once they are in office, and those that they entrust with these responsibilities need to create a sense of teamwork. They need to put an end to any rivalries or tensions that may have emerged in the course of either the pre-election operation or the transition itself. They need to send strong signals about expectations concerning behavior and commitment.

"The reality is that you need to have a sense of mission, of duty, of discipline." That task is one that must begin during the transition. There are usually going to be 600 people working in a White House. You need to have a system in place to deal with those 600 people and to make sure that things are going to be handled in a particular way.

Who to hire onto the White House Staff? In each administration the Presidential Records Act requires that all paper goes, so a new team comes in, has to function immediately, yet does not have the resources, the knowledge, to do so. Two views: That campaign people are inappropriate for a White House because the kind of schedule they work on, they're working on day-to-day. They're not doing anything long-range. When you come into a White House, you need a very different kind of person, one that can work over time, people who compromise. Campaign staff are characterized sometimes as difficult to rein in. On the other hand, there are people that say it is important to have campaign people because they know the rhythms of a President. It's important to have an understanding of what his needs are, what he likes, how he likes to get his information. And, importantly, they are the institutional memory. They have a sense of why they're there. And when those people leave a White House that White House can sometimes be in trouble and the administration lose its course. There are those who have felt, in the Reagan Administration, that Iran-Contra came about partially because those campaign people were no longer in the White House.

In the cruel world of politics, you need people who have been under fire and who have been bloody on the battlefield and who understand what the terrain is.

The Chief of Staff needs to be appointed early because of his importance in personnel and in considering process and setting up a decision-making system. See that the President is hearing the voices he needs to hear, that he's having the issues and ideas and the facts, lacerated, literally opened up and looked at from every angle. The integrating element in the White House because it's the chief who is going to bring together politics and legislative strategy and also communications and be responsible for operations, even if those operations are handled by a deputy. All these things must come together in order to have your legislative priorities and get things out at the right time and make sure that you communicate them effectively.

The Personnel Director is important in simply getting the descriptions of the job, developing a pool of people, and establishing priorities.

Legislative Affairs is important because they are going to handle the appointment confirmation process because of the policy agenda and establishing early what kind of relations the President's going to have with the Congress. You need the legislative affairs person to bring Members of Congress, the leadership, to the President-elect or arrange his visit to them.

The Counsel is important because of the vetting process, but also because of considering what kinds of ethics guidelines the new President's going to have and also because of executive orders. Presidents often want to come in "hitting the ground running," and one way is to issue executive orders-the counsel is required to do that.

The Press Secretary is the manager of the message and needs to be there to see how it can be best solved. Management and administration, a little-known post, is also one that's important, because if you don't get it right, you're going to hear about it. Usually, it's one that slides under the radar, but it is an office that handles how many slots there's going to be, what kinds of salaries people are going to get, and what kind of office space there's going to be, and they manage the internal employment operations in the White House.

It may be that there are too many political appointees that come in.  We've seen a dramatic inflation in the number of assistant secretaries and deputy assistant secretaries and people who required confirmation. The pressure to create those positions came from the Congress, because it extended Congressional control over the executive branch to have more people to confirm. So, there's sort of an upward spiral of inflation. The career people, paradoxically, can be more responsive than our own presidential appointees at the beginning. There are just too many and the civil service is willing to serve and desirous of serving whoever is President--and most of them are absolutely first rate.

The problem comes with the leaks, if you begin, if the people start talking about who's on the list for what and that becomes a story forever and the candidate has to defend it and that becomes a problem.  The FBI leaks like a sieve and you guys are so good at penetrating it, it's just open season. And it's not fair to the nominees and it's very unfair to nominees. If you let it out as to who you're going for before you've done the security checks, these enemies or opportunists will infiltrate even as much as the FBI process to begin to distort and corrupt the entire system to the point where you're just totally paralyzed. That's a very regrettable situation. The only solution is to try to keep these things confidential until the last minute.  A slogan in the White House counsel's office -- innocent until nominated.

Trying to decide how broad the broom should sweep without upsetting the constituencies that you need to govern, is very hard to do.  Appointing a shadow cabinet would be a terrible mistake. You just give yourself a whole new set of problems you don't need until you have to have them and give the opposition and the media the chance to go and investigate all of those people and find out all kinds of things. You'd probably have to retract almost all the nominations in a week.  

Fewer and fewer media correspondents are spending quality time with the candidates. And, therefore, as with any President you cover, if you don't really know the person you're covering, when terrible things happen in the middle of the night (the "3 AM Phone Call"), you really don't have a good handle on how that President and/or cabinet secretary is going to react.

The candidate is well advised to try to find the half a dozen to a dozen wise men/women who [a] do not want big jobs in the new government; [b] have held at least middle-sized jobs in previous governments, and are not out on the campaign trail.  It would be a great advantage for any candidate's group who are intelligent enough to realize this to have in place a kind of informal memory bank, if you will, wisdom bank of unambitious but accomplished people...that type of Washington veteran, who has been around, seen a great deal, knows what the pitfalls are.  They are invaluable resources.

The great irony of this photograph--that accompanies the U.S. News story of Obama's potential cabinet picks--is what lies on the Cabinet Room table...look carefully...this photo was taken on the day that the National Energy Policy Development Group ("The Energy Task Force") released the National Energy Policy. While it is doubtful that a President Obama would be sitting at this particular Cabinet table, set the way it is, the formation of a new and viable national energy policy will unquestionably be at the top of his list of priorities during his transition to the presidency...
 

 
Who'd Get the Top Cabinet Jobs for President Obama?
July 30, 2008 01:09 PM ET | Paul Bedard | Permanent Link

Yeah, yeah, he first has to win the presidency, but there's lots of buzz about whom Sen. Barack Obama might pick for his top cabinet jobs. Among them: Sen. Hillary Clinton as head of Health and Human Services. Her allies suggest she might be interested if the job were elevated to the top tier of agencies and if she were allowed to push healthcare reform. Other names: Sen. John Kerry as secretary of state, former Sen. Tom Daschle as White House chief of staff, former Clinton Commerce Secretary William Daley to head Treasury, and exiting Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel at Defense. Obama associates insist that they are not studying the cabinet puzzle yet, but with the media and his supporters treating him like the president already, can naming a cabinet be far behind? As for his ongoing search for a vice presidential nominee, there is nothing new to add other than that supporters of New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson want his name in the mix.

Candidates plan for a presidential transition
By Robert Pear

Sunday, September 21, 2008

WASHINGTON: Though they hate to discuss it, Senators John McCain and Barack Obama are quietly planning what to do in the frenetic 77-day period from the presidential election to Inauguration Day, so they will be ready to take up the reins of government

Democrats said that John Podesta, a former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, was leading the transition preparations for Obama. Podesta, who founded a lobbying firm with his brother in 1988, is president of the Center for American Progress, a sort of government-in-exile waiting for Democrats to regain power. At the McCain campaign, Republicans said, transition work is being coordinated by William Timmons, a longtime Washington lobbyist whose clients have included the American Petroleum Institute and the mortgage company Freddie Mac.

If McCain wins, Republicans said, his transition team will probably be led by Timmons and John Lehman, a McCain fund-raiser who was secretary of the navy under President Ronald Reagan.

Both campaigns refused to discuss their transition plans, saying they did not want to jinx their chances or appear too cocky. The Obama campaign was stung in July when Republicans called Obama presumptuous for lining up transition advisers.

Clay Johnson III, deputy director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said "the White House staff has met with transition representatives" for McCain and Obama.

"Both campaigns are doing what they need to do to be prepared to govern on Jan. 20 at noon," said Johnson, who was executive director of the Bush transition team in 2000-1. "The amount of work being done before the election, formal and informal, is the most ever."

McCain's transition planners are working at his campaign headquarters in Arlington, Virginia The Obama campaign is based in Chicago, but his transition planners are here in Washington.

Presidential scholars, historians and former White House officials of both parties say that transition planning, far from being premature, ought to have begun months ago.

With the nation at war and financial markets in turmoil, "early planning for the transition is more important than ever," said Martha Joynt Kumar, a professor of political science at Towson University in Maryland who is director of the White House Transition Project, a nonpartisan group that provides information and assistance to the transition teams of both candidates.

Experts on national security worry that America's opponents will try to take advantage of the uncertainty surrounding the transition, the first since the terrorist attacks of 2001.

"In every transition, there's a total vacuum for anywhere from three months to a year," Lehman said. "It's appalling. On 9/11, President Bush had only 30 percent of his national security appointees in place, and that was eight months after the inauguration."

Elaine Duke, an under secretary of homeland security, said her department was "poised and ready" to work with the McCain and Obama campaigns on transition planning before the Nov. 4 election. But she said, "We have not been contacted by either campaign."

Planning is essential, Duke said, because "terrorists perceive government transitions to be periods of increased vulnerability." She cited the bombing of the World Trade Center five weeks after Clinton took office in 1993; the Madrid train bombings in 2004, three days before national elections in Spain; and the car bomb attacks in London and Glasgow just days after a new British prime minister took office in 2007.

In February, Bush asked Congress for $35 million for transition activities, including $8.5 million for the General Services Administration, which provides office space, computers, telephones, travel services and other support to the transition team.

Congress has not acted on the budget request, and that has caused some alarm at the White House. A president-elect can use money from private donors, but must disclose the source and amount of contributions.

To a surprising degree, Democrats and Republicans agree on the lessons to be drawn from past transitions. The most urgent task, they said, is for the president-elect to choose his top White House staff, including a personnel director, even before naming his cabinet.

"Selecting senior White House aides is the most important step a president-elect can take to give identity, discipline and momentum to his fledgling administration," said Harrison Wellford, a Carter administration official who has advised Democrats on transition planning since 1976.

Ideally, Wellford said, the president-elect should announce his chief of staff a day after the election, name his economic and national security teams by Thanksgiving and complete his cabinet selections by mid-December.

There are more than 1,100 presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed positions in the executive branch. Johnson said that a new president had never had more than 25 of his cabinet and subcabinet nominees confirmed by the Senate before April 1.

In the post-9/11 world, Johnson said, the goal should be to have at least 100 in place by April, with a total of 400 confirmed by August.

In its final report, the 9/11 commission said the White House and Congress must "speed up the nomination, financial reporting, security clearance and confirmation process for national security officials" in a new administration.

Under a 2004 law, "each major party candidate for president may submit, before the date of the general election, requests for security clearances for prospective transition team members" who need access to classified information while working on the transition.

Duke said she understood that the McCain and Obama campaigns had requested security clearances for a total of about 100 people "in the last week or so."

Richard Neustadt, a Harvard professor and presidential scholar, used to say that new presidents-elect were "vulnerable to arrogance in ignorance," a sort of hubris born of innocence and inexperience in the "golden haze" after a grueling campaign.

By analyzing past transitions, he said, they can avoid repeating mistakes of their predecessors.

Wellford, a lifelong Democrat, said: "Democrats typically have not excelled at transitions. The standard for transition success, as judged by historians, was set by Ronald Reagan. The standard for transition disappointment was set by Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter."

On Feb. 18, 1981, just a month after taking office, Reagan and his budget director, David Stockman, sent Congress a detailed blueprint for the "Reagan revolution," a package of budget and tax cuts that set the agenda for the next four years. Many of the proposals became law.

Two conclusions: transitions lacking a theme will be given one by the press.   Secondly, an assigned theme will have a long shelf life.   If you've gone to the trouble of identifying what this presidency is about then you will continue to rely on that.

Focusing a Presidency: At the outset each president should think of an initial activity or something that dramatizes that portion of their character that they want to last the longest....  Early action is when the American people are giving them the most leeway, the best feeling, the most strength, and once they do that stick with it. To define their beliefs and then be consistent throughout their administration.

From the perspective of studying presidential transitions, this article is valuable in the insights it conveys regarding how cabinet officers are vetted in the media even before they are nominated to their positions.  This was certainly a deliberate leak of information from a campaign that has to date been very adept and careful in how they have gone about communicating the content of closed-door deliberations....

From The Sunday Times
October 19, 2008


Barack Obama lines up a cabinet of stars as John McCain struggles on

The Democrat may recruit some big names, including Republicans, to see America through the crisis

Sarah Baxter in Roanoke, Virginia

With the economy on the brink of recession and the country in the midst of two foreign wars, Barack Obama is considering appointing a cabinet of stars to steer America through potentially its worst crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s if he wins the presidency on November 4.

Obama has a well-regarded, close-knit team of domestic and foreign policy advisers who would follow him into the White House and key administration posts. But he is also being urged to make some high-profile appointments who would command the confidence of the country at such a troubled time.

"It's important to send a signal," an Obama adviser said. "With a comparatively new person in office and the awful mess we're in, these appointments are going to resonate around the world." Obama, 47, has been warning his supporters that the election is not over yet. "Don't underestimate our ability to screw it up," he said last week. But should Obama win, he will not be short of big names to choose for his administration.

A host of well-known figures, including some Republicans, have indicated they would be willing to serve in some capacity as Obama begins to acquire a winner's glow. From Senator John Kerry, the 2004 presidential candidate with hopes of becoming secretary of state, to Larry Summers, a former US Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, and Chuck Hagel, the Republican senator who has been tipped as defence secretary, there are plenty who have signalled their availability.

Obama is thought likely to cherry-pick a few high-profile names, while rewarding the loyalty and discretion of advisers such as his foreign policy expert Susan Rice who have served him so well throughout the campaign.

"He has no patience whatsoever with prima donnas," said one leading Democrat policy adviser. "He's surrounded himself with people who are pretty smooth in dealing with each other." All eyes were on Colin Powell, the former secretary of state under President George W Bush, to see if he would declare his support for Obama in an interview on Meet the Press, the flagship political television programme, today.

Powell is unlikely to return to the cabinet after the mauling he received over the Iraq war, but could serve as a special envoy abroad. He is regularly consulted by Obama on foreign policy and military matters, and said last year: "I always keep my eyes open and my ears open to requests for service."

In last week's debate against John McCain, his Republican opponent, Obama indicated that he would adopt a bipartisan approach to government, citing the Republican senator Richard Lugar, who worked with him on a bill to prevent nuclear weapons proliferation, and General Jim Jones, the former Nato commander, as figures he admired.

"Those are the people, Democrat and Republican, who have shaped my ideas and who will be surrounding me in the White House," Obama said.

If the Democrats win sweeping majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate as well as the White House, conservative voters could feel alienated from every branch of government. The McCain campaign is already playing up fears of a Democratic landslide to persuade Republicans and independents to back their man.

An editorial in The Wall Street Journal last week warned of a coming "liberal super-majority". It is possible Democrats could win a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority in the Senate, enabling them to pass whatever legislation they wanted, from higher taxes to greater union rights.

"Though we doubt most Americans realise it, this would be one of the most profound political and ideological shifts in US history. Liberals would dominate the entire government in a way they haven't since 1965 or 1933," the newspaper commented.

William Galston, a former White House policy adviser under Bill Clinton, said: "I don't think Obama is going to give Republicans much on substance, so he would be well advised to give them some satisfaction on personnel."

Some leading supporters, such as Kerry, may end up disappointed, even though he launched the then unknown Illinois politician's career at the 2004 Democratic national convention. "Frankly, how many senators do you want in the cabinet?" wondered one Obama adviser. If he wins the presidency, Obama has to beware of countering his message of "change" on the campaign stump by appointing too many Washington insiders.

Republicans hope the wall-to-wall coverage of the attack by the baldheaded Sam "Joe the plumber" Wurzelbacher on Obama's plans to increase taxes for those earning more than $250,000 a year has halted the Democrat's momentum. Some polls have tightened in favour of McCain, 72, but Obama retains an average lead of nearly seven points.

David Plouffe, Obama's coolly efficient campaign manager, believes his candidate is disproportionately strong in former Republican strongholds such as Virginia and Colorado. This could give Obama enough electoral college votes to push him past the winner's post, even if he loses the traditional battle-ground states of Florida and Ohio to McCain. The polls suggest that Obama leads by eight points in Virginia, a state that George W Bush won by the same margin in 2004.

In a show of confidence that rattled Republicans, Obama travelled on Friday to Roanoke on the edge of the Appalachian mountains in southwestern Virginia in search of the white, working-class voters who eluded him in the primary campaign against Hillary Clinton.

McCain, in contrast, was fighting a rearguard, defensive action in the northern tip of the state yesterday to shore up his support among the high-tech, white-collar, suburban voters who have been deserting his party.

The youth vote and black vote have been mobilised to an unprecedented degree by the Obama campaign, which has raised $454m - nearly double McCain's $230m - enabling it to spend on saturation advertising and organisation in areas that were once thought to be unwinnable. It is expected to announce a record-breaking haul of more than $100m in September.

The Democratic voter registration effort has reached far and wide. Althea Patterson, 40, an African-American insurance worker from Roanoke, said: "I've got friends who went out and got their criminal records expunged so they could vote for Obama." Former felons are barred from voting without a judge's dispensation.

Senator Jim Webb, the Virginia Democrat and former marine who served as navy secretary in President Ronald Reagan's administration, personally vouched for Obama's integrity. "You can trust me and I trust him," he told the rally in Roanoke. He cited the refrain from a country and western song to disparage McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate: "I know what I was doing but what was I thinking?"

With little more than two weeks until polling day, some leading Republicans suspect McCain is doomed. Peter Wehner, a senior White House official under Bush, said: "The Obama campaign is terrific. They've got boatloads of money and they're using it well. I don't think the race is over, but I always thought Obama would win. I'm a realist and I can read the polls and the electoral map as well as the next guy." A persistent question for Obama is how to make the most of Hillary Clinton's talents in government after she has helped to swing women and blue-collar workers behind him. Last week the New York senator put her chances of running again for president at "probably close to zero", leaving just a little wiggle room in case Obama loses in a fortnight's time and there is a vacancy.

Clinton added: "There's an old saying: bloom where you're planted."

In the event of an Obama victory, she hopes to inherit the mantle of lion of the Senate from Edward Kennedy and steer universal healthcare legislation through Congress.

However, members of Obama's inner circle believe she would be tempted to accept an offer to become health secretary, which would give her the historic opportunity to devise and implement the policy. "That's very possible. Senator Clinton would be terrific as health secretary," said Congressman Patrick Murphy, a leading Obama supporter.

Sorting out the economy is going to be the biggest test of Obama's presidency. "He's got to do something bold and a lot of it will be psychological," one of his advisers said. One of the names in the frame for Treasury secretary is Paul Volcker, the chairman of the Federal Reserve under President Ronald Reagan, who brought inflation under control in the early 1980s.

Admirers admit his age is against him - Volcker is 81 - but suggest he could oversee a financial rescue package before passing on the baton. Glenn Hubbard, the former head of the Council of Economic Advisers under Bush, said: "I can't think of anyone else with the same stature."

Volcker endorsed Obama back in January when Clinton was still the Democratic front-runner. "He would provide the confidence necessary to stabilise the markets and put together an economic plan to get the country moving again," an Obama adviser said. "This is the man who solved the last economic crisis."

Another leading candidate for the Treasury is Summers, who has been guiding Obama through the Wall Street melt-down. Summers was forced to quit as president of Harvard University in 2006 after suggesting controversially that men had a greater aptitude for science and engineering than women.

At a conference at Harvard Business School last week, Summers defended Obama's plans to tax the wealthy by pointing to the huge rise in inequality over the past 30 years between the earnings of the top 1% and bottom 80% of the country. "It is immense compared to any discussion of changing the tax system here or there," he said.

Obama may also want to reward Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of President John F Kennedy, for overseeing his vice-presidential selection and bringing the coveted family name to his campaign. She has been variously tipped as ambassador to the United Nations, the Vatican and even Britain - her grandfather Joseph Kennedy was sent packing from the same job in 1940 after saying democracy was finished. However, she may wish to remain in America and build on her experience as an education reformer in New York.

As Obama ponders his choice of cabinet, he may recall that there is a precedent for appointing well-established "stars" to shore up a relatively inexperienced president. George W Bush brought the powerful triumvirate of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Powell into his cabinet - and all were heavily criticised for their performance.

Wehner has learnt from experience inside the White House that voters can soon tire of distinguished names if they are unhappy with the results. "There will be a lot of talk about bipartisanship and a honeymoon period, but that will disappear if the economy is stagnating or gets worse," he said. "The public is very pragmatic and will make its judgment on results rather than optics. The acid test is how the country is doing."

I always remember right at the end of the Gorbachev regime, I asked Field Marshal Akromayov, who was the head of all military forces in the Soviet Union, the hero of Stalingrad, tough little guy.  I said, "When did you first know you had to deal with Ronald Reagan and you better get serious arms reductions?" And he said, "When he fired the air traffic controllers."  And, so, you never know how those things are going to happen; and it's infinitely harder to create a symbolic event that changes the stereotype than it is to just have it happen.

-Marlin Fitzwater

In the last eight years we have witnessed a president who has incorporated campaigning into governing, where President as President is also President as Candidate not just for reflection but also on a continuing basis.  He will go out campaigning for various policies and that's associated with, in my judgment, a greater publicness generally of the policy process. Not only does he campaign but every group, you name any major issue today and you will see campaigning on both sides in the media and, of course, on Capitol Hill and elsewhere.  This transition will be affected by the style of the last president, which in itself is affected by all kinds of technological developments in communicate.  Therefore, the transition has to accommodate that fact and hire second-generation political consultants and pollsters, those who are not only concerned about reelection but also concerned about this greater publicness of the policy process.  And the fact is that a lot of governing is through campaigning.

It's the White House staff that has to put all the work together, that makes you hit the ground running, that is going to determine how well you manage and how well you're perceived as managing.

Does he pick a Chief of Staff who's a person with stature in his own right or someone who's a professional staff person?   That will give you an insight as to whether he wants to run things or whether he's willing to delegate it to somebody else.

Selection of the White House staff is a crucial first marker.

Whether or not a president is interested in the problems of the preceding administration and dealing with them. I think you can take a look at the transition and see a new president really getting briefed up on the issues that he's facing that are holdover issues. Most presidents don't want them. "They're not mine. I didn't get in that trouble. I didn't step in that swamp."

About defeated candidates and defeated staff. The one thing about transitions more than anything else is it's incredibly personal. It makes transitions real tough if there's animosity and only the candidate can resolve that.  When the candidate wins and becomes the elected president, look for his public and his private statements about how much deference they're going to show to the outgoing administration.  If one guy on that transition team thinks you're a sympathizer for the outgoing administration, you're history. So, right away they shut down any possibility of a really good transition in that agency. Another thing to look for: what are these teams saying about the people in the agencies that they're coming in to take over?

The media revolution also dictates a more personal politics, because that's the way the media has gone. Television, for example, is a personal medium; it focuses on faces and personalities.

It is good to have a candidate who is looking at the presidency and thinking of it as being something different than what he's going through at the time and thinking of it in a slightly more scholarly way.

Have a sense of how the White House blows up everything disproportionately and what a global fish bowl it is and how intense the glare is.

Never allow a big announcement to be made in a speech.  Today, that's the least effective form of communication. You want to have a press conference; you want to be able to bring the press in. You want them to buy into the thing. You want to have instructions; you want to have chat rooms

Extraordinary transition performances: the smooth Eisenhower transition, and the dramatic first year of the Reagan presidency; you can see presidents who came in with a real sense of direction.

In some ways the bottom line on these people is not how smart they are, but how soundly their emotional wiring is.

The President must have good judgment about the people around him, about the issues he chooses to press, what he can get done, what is good for the country. That's how you acquire trust.  There's another element of it, which are good communication skills. They have to be able to communicate with the country.

Governing and campaigning are two entirely different studies and disciplines.

How do you manage the United States government? 

Jimmy Carter got elected to a great extent as President by promising to reform the bureaucracy.  There was a horrendous battle to get civil service reform through Congress, the compromises of all the interest groups and the public employee unions and everything.

Central things that are important about managing government.   Government management is not private-sector management. if you try to organize it and run it as if it were a private firm, you're going to fail.  Ludwig Von Mises, one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century, wrote a book called Bureaucracy in which this was the central theme, that the government can't be run like the private sector because it doesn't have the mechanism of the private sector.   It's the world's largest nonprofit corporation. You cannot approach this issue from the perspective of managing General Motors. There are a whole set of different incentives and structures that simply won't work if you try to do it that way.

What is the mechanism of the private sector? It's the bottom-line profit-and-loss signaling. Von Mises and Frederick Hayek both argued that socialism couldn't work because it didn't have a communication mechanism, a signaling mechanism, to respond between their customers and their leaders.  This is an enormously profound observation that these are different kinds of things and they react differently. The private sector has this marvelous signaling system that you can decentralize, as Von Mises said, hundreds of layers deep, at least in theory, and you can still get profit and loss from each separate profit center.  That's an enormous signal to find out at the top what's going on at the bottom, whether they're making a proper return on investment or not. Budget is important for setting priorities, enormously important for changing priorities and direction, but it can't manage people because it doesn't have the signaling system that it has in the private sector. What we've done is overlay a private-sector budget system on the government.

What do we mean by personnel management?   It's a rough system. It's not nice and sophisticated.  But it's really just three things. It's performance appraisal. It's the most enormous system in the government. Every employee gets appraised on what his work is to a greater or lesser degree of accuracy.  One of the big benefits of Jimmy Carter's reform of the civil service was that he put in a new, more rigorous performance appraisal system. It's the main way you can communicate down through the levels of bureaucracy and at the top get some sense of how work is being performed.   The second part of that is having some reward system attached to that performance appraisal system. Jimmy Carter put in place a performance management system with rewards, a bonus system for the senior executive and a merit pay system for a high level manager. Unfortunately, neither of them are in operation anymore. We've given up on that system.

The imperatives of leadership, political leadership, from the President's appointees.   The right attitude. must be loyalty to this President--the only one who has the legitimacy of being elected by the people.  The leadership must have courage.  Getting people focused on management issues at the very highest level. Meet with the President on these issues. Give strength, leadership, courage and vision to those who are out on the line doing the work.

Structural impediments that any new administration is going to face, Republican or Democrat.  A new administration will inherit a structure that is not necessarily focused on its agenda. That doesn't mean that the people in the government are bad people. It's just that they aren't coming at your agenda from your perspective.  How do you change that? You have to look at changing the incentive structure.   That is the interlocking structure, the relationship between the Congress, the bureaucracy, and the interest groups.

Try and find ways to change those personnel rules so that you can get rid of bad people and bring in good people.

Don't try and do everything. Focus on two or three key things that you want to manage and improve.

Look for ways to build accountability performance indicators, feedback loops if you will, into your management process.   One of the key areas where the federal government differs from the private sector.

The next transition team is going to have to start right out of the box.  Much has been attempted in the past to correct the situation and institutionalize the process of management improvement in a government that is as large and pervasive as ours here in the United States. But this should be done in an organized manner with the Congress rather than the piecemeal efforts of the past. Perhaps it is very difficult to do in a political environment, but we are entering a technological revolution in this country where the federal government, which represents around one-fourth of our economy, is in most cases far behind. The next President has a real opportunity to make this effort a cornerstone of his priorities at the beginning of his term. Otherwise, it will not happen.  It usually takes three years from the day that you start with a great idea to the time you get it appropriated to the time you can do a contract, to get it in place.

Three ingredients of good policy: personality, policy, and politics.   The right mix of personality and politics leads to good policy.  Personality is important in trying to get a job done. So is the quality of your managers. A political cadre is critical for any President to get his agenda across, but those people do need to be able to manage.   Political leadership is always held accountable for outcome. Whether it's through congressional oversight or through scrutiny of media or criticism from special-interest groups, the political sector is very much held accountable.  To get those jobs done, those folks need to be able to reassign the career people. They need to be able to reward them. They need to be able to assign the right jobs to the right people.

Reinventing Government.  Part of the National Performance Review agenda, the "Reinventing Government" agenda, was to create an entrepreneurial government On top of that; the next administration's going to be inheriting a whole new set of partners. There was an Executive Order in place that created a National Partnership Council, which is a new way of managing government with your friendly local labor union.  That may work for the Clinton Administration. They have natural political allies in the labor unions, federal employee unions. If those allies permit them to short-circuit their management structure to hold their management structure accountable to a political agenda, that's fine. That's a very efficient way of getting the job done.  If, however, that partner is on a different ideological agenda than you are, you have a major problem. At that point, you have gridlock in government and not progress. That's the potential danger for a new administration coming in inheriting these partnership councils.  A more conservative administration in the future would have a much more difficult job in getting its agenda in place.  The notion of asserting control is obviously key to a President getting his agenda in place. That, of course, stems from people, getting the right people in place.

Accountability and Incentive Structures.  Once you've made those decisions to the best of your ability, holding those people accountable is the natural way of managing government. You do not need to micromanage those people. If you've entrusted them with your agenda, if you keep them in the loop through Cabinet meetings, through senior-level staff meetings, then you don't need to manage the agenda. If you go off track, you always have the option of letting them go and replacing them with someone else. Unlike a career civil servant who is there long after you're gone, political leadership can be changed. That's really the way we do manage a political agenda: that ultimate accountability of replacement, losing the job.  For example, the intake stream to be merit-based. We moved very, very far away from merit-based staffing over the last 20 to 25 years. It would be good to get that reinstituted as a fundamental principle for managing the government.  We need to move to a market-based compensation system. Right now we have a one-size-fits-all pay system. That's close to dysfunctional in many occupations, and we're not attracting the right people, and we're not getting the best talent that we could as a result of that. There's no question we should be paying some people more. There is no question that we're overpaying a huge part of that workforce. So we definitely need a more market-based compensation system.

 

President Dwight Eisenhower being welcomed to New Hampshire by Governor Hugh Gregg. Behind Eisenhower stands New Hampshire Governor Sherman Adams (in office 1949-53), the man more responsible than any other for Eisenhower's election in 1952.

The first President to really establish a bureaucratized White House staff was President Eisenhower. His military experience and his experience at running large organizations like Columbia University influenced that choice. He instituted a much more formal structure. He was the first one to have a chief of staff, although, as he said at the time, "we don't call him a chief of staff because too many people would think that would sound military." However, as far as the news media were concerned, Sherman Adams was definitely referred to as a "chief of staff."

President Nixon started his White House occupancy talking about "cabinet government," but he soon found that cabinet government was not rapidly executing his orders the way in which he would like. He soon shifted to what some have called the "imperial presidency," and instituted what detractors, as well as some members of the White House staff, called the "Berlin Wall" of the three Germans: Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Kissinger.  Quite a gulf developed between the White House staff and the cabinet, in that many of the cabinet members were upset that they didn't feel they were in the loop of some of the decisionmaking. After Watergate, of course, there were many of them who were very happy that they were not in the loop.

There are those parts of the White House and the White House staff that deal with the matters that pertain to the President personally. These are things like the President's schedule, a very key element in how the White House runs, and the President's travel, the President's security, the White House residence and social events.  A separate grouping has to do with those functions that relate to the development of policy and the liaison or management of the executive branch.  A third area has to do with communications and outreach. It starts, of course, with the press secretary, a very key member of the White House staff.   Another important part of the communications function is the speechwriters.   The Office of Public Liaison, the Office of Political Affairs, the Office of Intergovernmental Relations-these are all part of the way in which the White House communicates with, and reaches out to, other aspects of the world outside the White House.

In the Reagan administration, the President came into office with some very clear objectives. He looked, at the outset, for a 180-day period, which happened to be the time between taking office on the 20th of January and the time that Congress normally leaves for recess in August. It was about a six-month period and he knew that in order to get his objectives accomplished, he had to get most of his program through in that period of time. His objectives were basically threefold: to revitalize the economy; to rebuild our military capability; and to restore the United States' position of leadership in the world, particularly as it related to the Cold War. Reagan's White House was shaped to carry out these specific objectives. Developing the White House and its basic structure, as well as principles of operation, began during the transition.  We had what was called in the first term "the Troika," a name that was coined by the news media, but there were three of us who had the division of responsibilities on the top level of the White House staff. Mike Deaver had the responsibility for those things relating particularly to the President personally, things like scheduling and travel. Jim Baker, as chief of staff, had the responsibility for the administration of the White House and for the legislative, the press, and the communications responsibilities. Another had the responsibility as counselor to the President for policy development, the administration of the cabinet, and the liaison with the executive branch. President Reagan was very strong on, right from the start, was the involvement of the cabinet and having the cabinet as the principal forum for decisionmaking. There was normally a full cabinet meeting at least once a week. He would then have cabinet council meetings, usually one or two of the councils related to domestic matters, and then two or three times a week with the National Security Council.

The specialized functions of the White House during a transition include the Office of Presidential Personnel, the White House Legal Counsel, the administrative office in the White House, the Office of Legislative Liaison (which is particularly key if a President has an ambitious legislative program), and national security affairs.

 

Each President has to determine, in organizing the White House structure, the relationship between these different components, their relationship to him, and the authority he's going to give them to deal with the world outside the White House, both governmental and nongovernmental.  A President's time and energy-are probably the most valuable commodities that he has. So, it's important to establish a structure of paper flow and information flow, but also of authorization of who can say what or request what.  The President has to make a decision in regard to the role of the cabinet. How will the cabinet relate to him and how will it relate to the White House staff?

The biggest threats to a President and an administration's legacy do not come from external enemies. They come from inside the White House: often overzealous loyalists, in the case of Watergate and Iran-Contra, or the President himself, in the case the Lewinsky affair. The best way to control the executive branch is to delegate as many issues as possible to cabinet secretaries and keep in close touch with them. The White House should be selective and reserve presidential intervention for high priority issues. If the White House tries to control everything, it will get overwhelmed. The President has to set the tone for the types of people that should be selected, with respect to political appointments, but he ought to delegate, in my judgment, much of the subcabinet recruitment to cabinet secretaries. The competence of administration officials will do much more for the President's reputation and legacy than will superficial loyalty. A new administration should not see career civil servants as the enemy or obstacles to be overcome, but should expect their enthusiastic support. And the sooner political appointees reach a cooperative accommodation them, the sooner the President's agenda can be enforced and accomplished.

Presidents have to have a clear mission and clear objectives. They have to have lots of interest groups behind what they want because we have weak parties. And they have to have the perception of unlimited resources, as Reagan did with respect to the buildup on the military side. There needs to be a central core of authority, central focus on objectives. And that's a very difficult thing to do on most issues in society.

There are strong policy operations inside the Congress, both House and Senate. And they tend to be somewhat partisan. The largest leadership staffs, both in the Democrat as well as the Republican parties, tend to be the policy operations. It is important that the White House establish good relations early on. Dealing with Congress. Of course, one of the most important aspects is the confirmation process. That's the first real test of the affairs operation. And while it tends to go well, and Congress wants to be helpful, you can't be careful enough.

Another problem can be the failure to follow-up high level, bipartisan communications. If you start that bipartisan process, it's important to follow through with it very well. It's very easy to slight Congress. Many congressional liaison or White House staff members tend to take cheap shots at Congress or the congressional leadership. That's not a very good way to get started.

The entertainment approach to dealing with Washington has increased. There will be increased pressure-not only on this presidency but on future presidencies-to constantly focus on what counter message you can present, that will try to reduce other stories that are playing to back pages of the newspaper.

The Office of Legal Counsel and the Department of Justice should be included in National Security-related deliberations. That was one of the problems that gave rise to the whole Iran-Contra. Likewise with military matters, you need the input from the Department of Defense going through, even if it might take an extra 24 hours to have it presented. That's why the National Security Council, indeed, has to operate as a council, with the representatives from these outside departments, particularly Defense, the State Department, and the CIA. You don't want that done by a bureaucratized NSC staff which thinks of itself as the State Department or as the Defense Department itself. The attorney general of the United States should be, in a sense, the most intimate advisor of the President.

An important part of managing the government is team building. That is for the President to keep in touch, even though it's very difficult to do, with not just the cabinet members but with the sub-cabinet members, the undersecretaries, the deputy secretaries, the assistant secretaries, all of whom are his appointees and who feel at the start a great loyalty to the President. And one of the purposes of the White House staff is to maintain that loyalty throughout the presidency. Some presidents have held meetings several times a year in the Indian Treaty Room or in the auditorium of the Old Executive Office Building at which these sub-cabinet officials would hear talks by the President or by other cabinet members, and as a result, continuing to feel that they were part of a team.

 

The President now is not only commander in chief. He is also the chief negotiator, ambassador, and diplomat to the world. He is the primary policymaker that can have an impact on issues from the economy to budget to health care to other domestic areas. He is head of the political party. He has to be the national chaplain. He is husband. He is father. He's America's first citizen.

The reality is that we really have increased the responsibilities and the role of the presidency and that, as a consequence, has changed the very nature and power that is associated with the support system that we call the staff to the presidency. The Presidency has gone from being largely a liaison or conduit to the cabinet and to other officials to being now a central policy coordinator and indeed, policymaker. In a very fast-moving world in the presidency, proximity is power.

There is a fundamental responsibility that involves the national interest. It involves leading. No matter how you put the staff in place, whoever you put in the cabinet, there is no staff and no cabinet that can replace the leadership of the President. You can have the greatest chief of staff. You can have the greatest staff in the world. You can have the greatest cabinet in the world. But if that President doesn't have the capability and the intelligence and leadership to really guide the government, then there's really little that we could do to replace that. So ultimately, it is the strength and leadership of the President that will determine whether or not the operation of a White House really works well.

One is an informal approach in which there is open door approach to the staff, allowing them to have free access to the President, free access to briefings and discussions that take place with the President. This is a center-of-the-wheel kind of approach that President Kennedy put in place. The other approach is a structured approach. The informal way has been compared to a soccer game in grammar school, where all of the kids go after the ball at the same time. The chief of staff's job in that light-and I've often said this-is not so much a management job as a battlefield position. The reality is that you have to have a sense of mission, of duty, of discipline. The staff has to remain focused, even though there may be incoming fire and a lot of issues that are breaking that are not necessarily related to what you want to have as the President's primary message for that day. Nevertheless, the staff has to be focused and disciplined and they have to continue to do their jobs. It is important; therefore, to establish a very clear chain of command and an organization chart in which each staff member knows who they are reporting to, who their supervisor is. it's important to establish rules regarding discipline, behavior, and access to the President, to briefings, to events, to Air Force One. you have to establish clear lines of discipline and behavior for access to the President. You have to assure that the briefings for the President are well prepared, well-organized, brief, clear, direct, and that they present a set of options to the President so that he can ultimately make the decision.

An approach in vetting information such as briefings is to have the briefing presented to the chief of staff, so that he can see what kind of presentation will be made, what the options are and try to tighten it up as much as possible for presentation to the President.

There is a tendency to think that the honeymoon period of an administration will last for a long time and that there will always to be an opportunity to appoint this team. The reality is if you are not establishing policy within the White House on Inauguration Day, if you are not taking the offensive within the White House, then others will. It's just the nature of the town.

It is important to have experience in Washington. That key staff people have to be good spokespersons. They've got to make their case to Capitol Hill. They've got to be able to make the case to the American people. They've got to appear on the Sunday shows. You need to have people that can represent the administration and present their views effectively to the public. Important to appoint the key staff as soon as the President is elected. That ought to be on a new President's schedule every bit as much as looking at a new cabinet, because you need to have your personal team in place as you move forward.

You need to have your chief of staff and your deputies if possible, because that's your key management operation in the White House. You need to have your key foreign policy team. The head of the NSC is now largely responsible for coordinating all foreign policy issues with the State Department and the Defense Department playing their role. But make no mistake about it, the NSC director is extremely important to the foreign policy development of the presidency.

Did you find this lens interesting? Please rate the lens by clicking the stars at the top of the screen.

Many Thanks!

John

Nation Elects Its First African-American President Amid Record Turnout; Turmoil in Economy Dominates Voters' Concerns

Article By JONATHAN WEISMAN and LAURA MECKLER

WASHINGTON -- The day after Sen. Barack Obama's historic presidential win, attention turned to his transition team and new administration.



Sen. Obama already made the first selection for the new administration, choosing Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel to be his White House chief of staff, the Associated Press reported. Several Democrats also said Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, who lost the party's presidential bid four years ago, was actively seeking appointment as Secretary of State in the new administration, according to the AP.

Meanwhile, the nation's top intelligence officials were to begin highly classified daily briefings with Sen. Obama Thursday. A U.S. intelligence official said Sen. Joe Biden, the vice president-elect, will begin to get his own briefings beginning this week.

President George W. Bush promised to cooperate with Sen. Obama in the transition work that will precede the transfer of power on Jan. 20. Mr. Bush went to the Rose Garden of the White House Wednesday morning to also pay tribute to Sen. John McCain and Sarah Palin, the losing Republican ticket.

He said that Sen. Obama's election was a historic breakthrough in a country that has had monumental civil rights battles. Mr. Bush said, "No matter how they cast their ballots, all Americans can be proud of the history that was made yesterday."

Sen. Obama scored an Electoral College landslide that redrew America's political dynamics in defeating Sen. McCain as citizens surged to the polls in a presidential race that climaxed amid the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

The electoral vote was 349 to 163 in Sen. Obama's favor as of early Wednesday, with three states still to be decided. Those were North Carolina, Georgia and Missouri.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev issued a congratulatory telegram saying there is "solid positive potential" for the election to improve strained relations between Washington and Moscow, if Sen. Obama engages in constructive dialogue.

Yet he appeared to be deliberately provocative hours after the election with sharp criticism of the U.S. and his announcement that Russia will deploy missiles near NATO member Poland in response to U.S. missile defense plans.

In Afghanistan, where villagers said the U.S. bombed a wedding party and killed 37 people, President Hamid Karzai said: "This is my first demand of the new president of the United States -- to put an end to civilian casualties."

From the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI sent Sen. Obama a personal note delivering his prayers for God's blessing on him.

Speaking from Hong Kong, retired Gen. Colin Powell, the Republican whose endorsement of Sen. Obama symbolized the candidate's bipartisan reach and bolstered him against charges of inexperience, said he won't likely be part of the new administration.
"I am not interested in a position in government, nor have I been approached," said Gen. Powell. The former Army general and secretary of state under President George W. Bush said the election marked a generational shift in the U.S., and that he would always be available to offer advice. "I'm not expecting to go to government," he said.

When asked specifically about whether he might serve as Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense, Gen. Powell shrugged it off, saying: "Why? I've done it."

.....

The president-elect will enter office with a long policy wish list that includes ending the war in Iraq, implementing a near-universal health-insurance plan and finding alternatives to Middle Eastern oil. All this will have to be carried out amid record budget deficits, a looming crisis in Social Security and Medicare spending as the baby-boom generation retires and fears that the nation is on the edge of a deep recession.

.....

The transition to an Obama administration could begin almost immediately. A shadow Treasury team could be in place by the end of the week, aides say. In many ways, the transition has already started. John Podesta, a former White House chief of staff under President Clinton, has been leading quiet conversations about key positions, especially those relating to the economy.

......

According to early exit poll data, 62% of voters said the economy was their top concern. All other issues, including terrorism and the war in Iraq, were far behind. In 2004, terrorism and the economy were tied at about 20%.

Sen. Obama's promises will be challenges to keep in the face of a likely recession, two wars and record budget deficits.

He has promised to end the war in Iraq and reduce troop levels quickly. He has also vowed to redouble efforts to stabilize Afghanistan, beef up the U.S. military presence there and to reinvigorate efforts against al Qaeda, both in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

He promised to create a new government-organized health care marketplace and cut taxes for every family earning less than $200,000 and raise them for families over $250,000.

New President To Face Appointee Troubles

He has vowed to wean the country of Middle Eastern oil over 10 years, dedicating $150 billion to alternative and renewable energy research and development, likening the challenge to that of putting a man on the moon. He has said he will cap greenhouse-gas emissions and force polluters to begin paying for emission permits in order to tackle global warming.

He has also promised billions of federal dollars for education, teacher training and recruitment. College applicants would be given tax incentives to offset tuition in exchange for national service.

In the short run, Sen. Obama has promised to prime the flagging economy with billions of dollars for infrastructure, unemployment insurance and Medicaid. Banks would have to temporarily halt home foreclosures in exchange for government assistance.

The incoming president will have some advantages, including the apparent enthusiastic backing of voters. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released Monday found that 81% of Obama supporters said their vote was for him, not against Sen. McCain. Exit polls found 56% of voters were either optimistic or excited about what Sen. Obama would do as president.

And two-thirds of voters in the Journal poll said they understand Sen. Obama's message and know what he will do as president, just shy of the 72% who said that about President Bush when he stood for re-election in 2004.

With strong majorities in Congress, President-elect Obama is likely to start fast, with a large economic-stimulus package, legislation to fund embryonic stem-cell research and an expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, a government insurance program which will be financed with a rise in the tobacco tax.

After that, Democrats are divided over how to proceed. Old-guard liberals want to move as fast as possible while they have solid majorities and an electoral mandate. Conservative Democrats want more attention paid to a federal budget deficit that could approach $1 trillion this fiscal year.

Democratic leaders in Congress, mindful of Bill Clinton's health-care debacle of 1993 and the Republican resurgence that swept them from power the next year, counsel a cautious approach that builds bipartisan and voter support before moving on the president-elect's big-ticket items.

The president-elect will not have much time to decide. By early February, he will have to produce a budget that lays out his spending and tax priorities at least over the next five years and hints at what he will do to confront the looming costs of Social Security and Medicare.

Possibly in Barack Obama's Cabinet

Attorney General: Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, Former deputy attorney general Eric Holder, Mass. Gov. Deval Patrick

Defense Secretary: Current Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Sen. Jack Reed (D., R.I.), Sen. Chuck Hagel (R., Neb.)

Press Secretary: Aide Robert Gibbs Aides Linda Douglass, Bill Burton, Stephanie Cutter

Secretary of State: New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, Sen. John Kerry (D., Mass.), Sen. Richard Lugar (R., Ind.)

Secretary of Agriculture: Former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, Rep. Collin Peterson (D., Minn.)

Secretary of Education: Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, U. of Oklahoma president David Boren, Former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean

Secretary of Energy or Transportation: Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell

Secretary of Health and Human Services: Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, Sen. Tom Daschle (D., S.D.), Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean

Senior adviser/political posts: Aide David Plouffe, Aide David Axelrod, Aide Steve Hildebrand

Treasury Secretary: Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, Federal Reserve Bank of New York President Timothy Geithner, Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker

Secretary of Commerce: Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, Fundraiser Penny Pritzker, Sen. Olympia Snowe (R., Maine)

-Elizabeth Holmes, Amy Chozick, Stephanie Simon, Paulo Prada, Christopher Cooper and the Associated Press contributed to this article

Impeachment was a symptom of something deeper in terms of the political conflict that is going on right now. And it's fed by a lot of different sources. It's fed by sound bites. It's fed by money. It's fed by the competition for power. If you look at the Congress right now, there is no incentive for either party to give the other side any break in terms of accomplishing anything because each side thinks that it has a real chance to gain power or to retain power. As a consequence, the incentive is not to govern. The incentive is not to put a deal together. The incentive is basically to confront the other side. How does that change? In part, it has to change because the President has to set the tone that it is important to govern and that he's willing to listen to both sides in his willingness to govern. If it looks like it simply reduces to a kind of trench warfare, as it has been over these last few years, then it is unlikely to change. If the President is willing to break out of the trench and really engage the Congress and the leadership on both sides, and the leadership in the Congress is willing to engage as well in a forthright basis, not on a sound bite basis, then things can change. All of the factors that are play in politics right now work against that. The simple answer to how any President can work better with Congress is to concentrate on it, try to develop those relationships. Don't concentrate entirely on going outside of Washington to build coalitions or bring your approval numbers up to a certain level and then beat Congress over the head with that. Personal relationships are the currency of this town.

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Obama likely to name Republican to Cabinet

Christina Bellantoni 

CHICAGO | President-elect Barack Obama will reach to the middle and offer more than just-for-show appointments to Republicans in his administration, friends and colleagues predicted Wednesday.

An Obama administration "will be reasonable and logical, not ideological," Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine told The Washington Times in an interview. "It will be about results, not rhetoric." Mr. Kaine is a longtime friend of Mr. Obama's and an early backer who campaigned extensively for the Illinois Democrat and has advised him informally on economic matters.

Mr. Kaine speculated that Mr. Obama would run "a very progressive administration," but also one that will try to find "pragmatic" solutions to problems.

"Much of it will be centrist, but it will be the smart center, using technology and new ideas and creativity to find common ground," he said.

"He likes to argue, and he certainly doesn't mind smart, opinionated people around him," Mr. Kaine said, declining to say whether he'd consider a position himself.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, an Obama foreign-policy adviser, echoed a similar sentiment in a recent interview with The Times.

"I think a lot about what makes somebody a good leader [is] the combination of curiosity, confidence in oneself that you can hear a lot of different ideas that it doesn't make you upset if somebody disagrees with you," she said.

She said Mr. Obama shares that in common with President Clinton, the last Democratic president, who included Republicans in his Cabinet.

Mr. Obama is expected to appoint a mix of familiar hands from the Clinton administration, along with some of the nation's governors and former candidates.

Mr. Obama early on collected friends and endorsers from the governors' mansions across the country. Among the contenders for an Obama administration are Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona and Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas.

Several former candidates who got to know Mr. Obama during his long and historic White House bid may also be on a shortlist for top spots. Among them are Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson.

On both foreign policy and the economy, Mr. Obama already has a trusted, large team he assembled during the campaign.

Susan Rice, Greg Craig and Denis McDonough are all thought to be top contenders for national-security or State Department posts.

On the economic side, Mr. Obama's top adviser, Austan Goolsbee, is likely to score a prime position, and billionaire Warren Buffett may even play some role in the administration.

Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, who is a political hand and not a policy guy, may join him in the White House, along with chief strategist David Axelrod.

But some warned that Mr. Obama, who will take the oath of office Jan. 20, may need to brace for possible showdowns with liberal members of Congress who say he has a mandate for major liberal initiatives.

The liberal Center for American Progress Action Fund boasted Wednesday that Mr. Obama "ran on the most progressive platform of any presidential candidate in at least 15 years." The group said it aimed to "rise to the occasion" as "leaders who support progressive ideals will take up the reins of government in Washington."

"We can translate yesterday's victory at the polls into a victory for health care, clean energy, national security, and a stronger and larger middle class," the group added. "The American people are ready. Now it's time to deliver."

Rank-and-file Obama backers voiced the same hope for progressive leanings.

Marina Santiago, who works for an advertising firm in Chicago, said at the Obama celebration Tuesday night that she expects the new president to keep his word.

"I expect him to do what he's been saying -- to be for the working people, to help young people go to college, get health care for everyone," she said.

The staff, as a result of is evolution, is now a very important coordinator and developer and implementor of policy. This is not to say that the cabinet is not important. The cabinet has to operate the departments and agencies. And indeed, they will come up with important issues that the President can implement.  Proximity to the presidency is the most important factor.  In the modern presidency, an effective and capable staff is going to be essential to an effective and capable presidency.  It's going to be hard to cut back seriously on the White House staff. The new President cannot easily jettison any one of these offices.

A President and his appointees, his cabinet and subcabinet people, have to be clear in what their objectives are and provide that leadership so that the people in the career service know.

They have to provide actual leadership, knowing what their people are doing and being available for two-way conversation even when somebody says that's a dumb idea that was tried two administrations ago, and give respect to the civil service.

There are a lot of little things that people in government can do to show their respect for the career servants, like going to the award ceremonies that they have a couple of times a year. Supporting the Federal Executive Institute by going out there to lecture occasionally, and doing those kinds of things to let them know that you believe that career service is important.

If someone from another party gets elected, there's going to be a natural suspicion and paranoia about the career service, as to whether or not they're really going to represent the ideals of the new presidency. They've served under another party. They've become ingrained with the other party's point of view on issues and priorities. There is that inherent suspicion and paranoia about career servants, particularly if you're going in after another administration.

How you break that? Really rely on your cabinet secretaries and your department heads to evaluate who's good, who's not good, and try not to automatically assume that just because somebody's a career person, that person may not view issues the same way.

By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press Writer
Sat Nov 8, 3:17 pm ET

WASHINGTON - All presidents are tested. Few walk into the Oval Office when the nation is in the throes of multiple crises.
Like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President-elect Obama is facing a banking emergency.
Like Abraham Lincoln, Obama is trying to patch up national divisions. To ready himself for the job, Obama said Friday he is reading some writings by Lincoln, "who's always an extraordinary inspiration."
And like Richard Nixon, George W. Bush and others, Obama will be commander in chief over U.S. troops in combat.
"With two wars and an economic crisis, this is one step away from what Lincoln or FDR faced," said Terry Sullivan, associate professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "The question is `Which direction is the nation going to go?'"
While the challenges Obama faces are daunting, they also give him the opportunity to shape history in a big way.
"My 88-year-old mother asks me regularly, `Why would anybody want to be president now?' said Sullivan, who manages the Presidential Transition Project at Rice University. "My answer is 'Every one of them wants to be FDR.' This is their chance. What makes fame in the American presidency is a great challenge and succeeding." Or, Sullivan added, facing a great challenge and failing.
In fewer than 11 weeks, Obama will inherit not just the economic crisis and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the ongoing threat of a terrorist attack, a resurgent Russia and nuclear proliferation in hot spots across the globe.
"We are in an almost unprecedented situation, at least in modern times," White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten said in a C-SPAN interview Friday.
Knowing his opening moves will be widely scrutinized, Obama tried to roll back expectations on election night.
"Our climb will be steep," he said. "We may not get there in one year or even in one term."
Yet he remained upbeat as did Roosevelt, who took the reins of a nation in the depths of the Depression. FDR used his optimism to lift up the downtrodden and refresh the American spirit. "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," he said at his inauguration in 1933.
When Roosevelt died in 1945, by then a wartime president making secret plans for an atomic bomb, Harry Truman told reporters, "I felt like the moon, the stars and all the planets had fallen on me."
In an earlier conflict, when the country was on the brink of civil war, Lincoln took a hands-off approach during a four-month lag between his election and inauguration, staying mum so as not to inflame tensions in the North or the South. After Lincoln was elected, but before he took office, South Carolina announced its decision to secede from the Union. Six more states then seceded and together formed the Confederate States of America.
During the transition, Lincoln maintained what became known as an attitude of "masterly inactivity," said Harold Holzer, who recently wrote the book "Lincoln President-Elect." Lincoln didn't want to do anything that would upset the South, lose him the support of abolitionists in the North or the northern Democrats whom he needed on his side if there was going to be a fight to save the union.
"He thought the best way to deal with it was to be silent," Holzer said.
Like Lincoln, Obama used his first speech as president-elect to try to mend fences - and he did it by quoting Lincoln's conciliatory first inaugural address, which was given at a time of such national turmoil that Lincoln traveled to Washington in secret for safety.
"Let's remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House, a party founded on the values of self-reliance and individual liberty and national unity," Obama said of Lincoln, another lanky lawmaker from Illinois.
"As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, we are not enemies but friends," Obama said. "Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection."
To reach out to his critics, Lincoln even allowed a reporter from an opposition newspaper, a journalist named Henry Villard, to virtually move into his office in Springfield, Mo., to chronicle the transition.
"That's the equivalent of Obama picking up the phone and asking Sean Hannity to move in," Holzer said of the conservative television personality.
Roosevelt, who picked members of the opposing party for Cabinet spots, was as noncommittal as Lincoln as he was about to be sworn into office amid a banking crisis. When Herbert Hoover asked him to sign on to a bank holiday - a temporary closure of banks - three days before inauguration, Roosevelt famously looked up and said, "The drapes look very pretty. I'm sure Eleanor will want to keep these just as they are."
That made Hoover furious. Soon after taking the oath of office, Roosevelt declared the banking holiday on his own.
In his first fireside chat in March 1933, FDR said: "We had a bad banking situation. Some of our bankers had shown themselves either incompetent or dishonest in their handling of the people's funds. They had used the money entrusted to them in speculations and unwise loans. ... It was the government's job to straighten out this situation and do it as quickly as possible, and the job is being performed."
Sound familiar?
"He wanted to do it himself. A clean slate is what Lincoln wanted. It's what Roosevelt wanted," Holzer said. "The lessons of history are there. The most successful transformative presidencies were patient between the election and the inauguration."
Maybe history is repeating itself in that regard. When President Bush announced before the election that he was hosting a global economic summit in Washington on Nov. 15, the Obama camp said the presidential hopeful wouldn't be there. "He understands there is only one president," an Obama adviser said.
It's early in the transition to draw many conclusions, but Obama's style as a candidate and a legislator was to proceed in a measured, disciplined fashion.
"Obama is an empty vessel into which the American people can be expected to pour their inexhaustible supply of hope - in just the same way that they did in 1932," said Bruce Kuklick, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Obama supporters who spontaneously flocked to the White House into the wee hours after his election Tuesday night were anxious for Obama to move forward. Gazing at the illuminated Executive Mansion where Bush slept, one waved signs that said: "Why wait? Evict Bush now."
For some, jubilation was tempered by recognition of the enormity of the tasks Obama faces.
"It's not just about him," said Rachel Reclam, of Olympia, Wash., an international affairs student at George Washington University. "He inspired people, but I'm not expecting miracles. The financial crisis, the war in Iraq, the health care crisis are not going to be over tomorrow."

03:20 PM CST on Saturday, November 8, 2008

WASHINGTON - With the economy in disarray and the nation's treasury draining, President-elect Barack Obama and his advisers are trying to figure out which of his expansive campaign promises to push in the opening months of his tenure and which to put on a slower track.

Obama repeated on Saturday that his first priority would be an economic recovery program to get the nation's business system back on track and people back to work. But advisers said the question was whether they could tackle health care, climate change and energy independence at once or needed to stagger these initiatives over time.

The debate between a big-bang strategy of pressing aggressively on multiple fronts versus a more pragmatic, step-by-step approach has flavored the discussion among Obama's transition advisers for months, even before his election. The tension between these strategies has been a recurring theme in the memorandums prepared for him on various issues, advisers said.

"Every president is tempted to take on too much," said one Obama adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. "On the other hand, there's the Roosevelt example and the LBJ example, which suggest an extraordinary president can do an awful lot. So that's the question: Is it too risky for the president to be ambitious?"

Much of the issue may be out of Obama's hands. The $700 billion financial bailout threatens to push the deficit into the stratosphere. "The poor man has his hands tied by the economic and financial mess we have right now," said John Tuck, a former aide to President Ronald Reagan. "I don't know what his options are. They're very, very limited."

At a news conference Friday and again in a radio address on Saturday, Obama signaled that he intends to move quickly to address the nation's financial problems, despite any obstacles. "I want to ensure that we hit the ground running on Jan. 20 because we don't have a moment to lose," he said Saturday.

The argument for an aggressive approach in the mold of Franklin D. Roosevelt or Lyndon B. Johnson is that health care, energy and education are all part of systemic economic problems and should be addressed comprehensively. But Democrats are discussing a hybrid strategy that would push for a bold economic program and also encompass other elements of Obama's campaign platform, even if larger goals are put off.

Congressional leaders want to move swiftly in January to pass a major expansion of the Children's Health Insurance Program - a plan vetoed by President Bush - as a step toward the broader coverage Obama promised. Likewise, Democrats plan to incorporate his proposed middle-class tax cuts in the economic legislation or pass them in tandem. And Obama could increase investment in alternative energy as a down payment on a far-reaching climate plan.

"I believe it would be important to show fairly early on that change is here," said Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, a member of the House Democratic leadership. "One of the very visible ways to show that would be to pass some of the bills George Bush vetoed."

Obama has acknowledged that the economy will force him to recalibrate his program but insists that he has not backed off his commitments. "We can't afford to wait on moving forward on the key priorities that I identified during the campaign, including clean energy, health care, education and tax relief for middle class families," he said Saturday.

During the campaign, Obama identified many other priorities - withdrawing from Iraq and talks with Iran, tackling immigration and the issue of detainees at Guantenamo and trade negotiations with the country's North American neighbors.

At the same time, his team is tamping down expectations of instant action by discouraging talk of a 100-day program.

Obama's transition advisers studied how Kennedy, Roosevelt, Johnson, Reagan and Bill Clinton used their first months. The lesson many drew was that even if various agencies moved forward in many directions, a new president must husband his time, energy and political capital for three dominant priorities at most. Several Obama advisers cited Reagan, who concentrated his early efforts on pushing through major tax cuts and increased military spending.

But advisers also worry that putting off sweeping initiatives makes them harder to pass later, when a president's mandate and momentum have faded. Again, they pointed to Clinton, who delayed his ultimately doomed health care plan while he passed a deficit reduction package and the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The pent-up demand from Democrats who waited out the Bush administration will be enormous. "In the next three months before they take over, the list of demands on the table is going to be staggering, absolutely staggering," said former Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa, a Republican who endorsed Obama during the campaign.

Obama recognizes that. In an interview on CNN days before the election, he explicitly ranked his priorities, starting with an economic recovery package that would include middle-class tax relief. His second priority, he said, would be energy; third, health care; fourth, tax restructuring; and fifth, education.

But then he hedged, foreseeing the unforeseen. "We don't know yet what's going to happen in January," he said. "And none of this can be accomplished if we continue to see a potential meltdown in the banking system or the financial system."

In an effort to capture lessons from the past, I've compiled numerous observations from many diverse sources into a single document-a "summary/extract," if you will. Unabashedly, I've assumed the role of editor for this work. Often, you'll see wording that reflects direct quotes pieced together to achieve the essence of the subject or discussion at hand. My revisions to phraseology and sentence structure were made to enhance clarity and brevity. My sources include:

a. The Brookings Institution, The Presidential Appointee Initiative, "A Survivor's Guide for Presidential Nominees."

b. The Council for Excellence in Government, Government From the Inside, 8 Sessions.

c. The Brookings Institution and The Heritage Foundation, "The Merit and Reputation of an Administration: Presidential Appointees on the Appointments Process," April 2000.

d. The Heritage Foundation, Mandate for Leadership Project, 9 Sessions.

e. The Heritage Foundation, The Keys to a Successful Presidency, 2000.

f. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Preparing to Be President: The Memos of Richard Neustadt, Edited by Charles O. Jones. (Washington, D.C.: The AEI Press, 2000).

I welcome your comments and look forward to the discussion!

Photo: White House at Twilight, by John Glover

Nov 9, 5:10 PM (ET)

By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER
WASHINGTON (AP) - President-elect Obama plans to use his executive powers to make an immediate impact when he takes office, perhaps reversing Bush administration policies on stem cell research and domestic drilling for oil and natural gas.

John Podesta, Obama's transition chief, said Sunday Obama is reviewing President Bush's executive orders on those issues and others as he works to undo policies enacted during eight years of Republican rule. He said the president can use such orders to move quickly on his own.

"There's a lot that the president can do using his executive authority without waiting for congressional action, and I think we'll see the president do that," Podesta said. "I think that he feels like he has a real mandate for change. We need to get off the course that the Bush administration has set."

Podesta also said Obama is working to build a diverse Cabinet. That includes reaching out to Republicans and independents - part of the broad coalition that supported Obama during the race against Republican John McCain. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been mentioned as a possible holdover.

"He's not even a Republican," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said. "Why wouldn't we want to keep him? He's never been a registered Republican."

Obama was elected on a promise of change, but the nature of the job makes it difficult for presidents to do much that has an immediate impact on the lives of average people. Congress plans to take up a second economic aid plan before year's end - an effort Obama supports. But it could be months or longer before taxpayers see the effect.

Obama could use his executive powers to at least signal that Washington is changing.

"Obama's advantage of course is he'll have the House and the Senate working with him, and that makes it easier," said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond. "But even then, having an immediate impact is very difficult to do because the machinery of government doesn't move that quickly."

Presidents long have used executive orders to impose policy and set priorities. One of Bush's first acts was to reinstate full abortion restrictions on U.S. overseas aid. The restrictions were first ordered by President Reagan and the first President Bush followed suit. President Clinton lifted them soon after he occupied the Oval Office and it wouldn't be surprising if Obama did the same.

Executive orders "have the power of law and they can cover just about anything," Tobias said in a telephone interview.

Bush used his executive power to limit federal spending on embryonic stem cell research, a position championed by opponents of abortion rights who argue that destroying embryos is akin to killing a fetus. Obama has supported the research in an effort to find cures for diseases such as Alzheimer's. Many moderate Republicans also support the research, giving it the stamp of bipartisanship.

On drilling, the federal Bureau of Land Management is opening about 360,000 acres of public land in Utah to oil and gas drilling. Bush administration officials argue that the drilling will not harm sensitive areas; environmentalists oppose it.

"They want to have oil and gas drilling in some of the most sensitive, fragile lands in Utah," Podesta said. "I think that's a mistake."

Two top House Republicans said there is a willingness to try to work with Obama to get things done. But they said to expect Republicans to serve as a check against the power held by Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress.

"It's going to be a cheerful opposition," said Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind. "We're going to carry those timeless principles of limited government, a strong defense, traditional values, to the American people."

Pence, of Indiana, is expected to take over the No. 3 leadership post among House Republicans.

In other transition matters, Obama's new chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, would not say whether Obama would return to the Senate for votes during the postelection session this month. Obama's presence would be extraordinary, given his position as president-elect, especially if Congress takes up a much-anticipated economic stimulus plan.

"I think that the basic approach has been he's going to be here in Chicago, setting up his economic, not only his economic team, but the policies he wants to outline for the country as soon as he gets sworn in, so we hit the ground running," Emanuel said.

Also, Emanuel would not commit to a Democratic proposal to help the auto industry with some of the $700 billion approved by Congress to for the financial bailout.

Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a letter Saturday to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson that the administration should consider expanding the bailout to include car companies.

Podesta appeared on "Fox News Sunday," as did Pence, and CNN's "Late Edition," where Reid also was interviewed. Emanuel spoke on ABC's "This Week" and CBS'"Face the Nation."

 

FDR knew that Social Security was a radical idea for the times. He felt the people would feel that it would undermine their ideal of self-reliance. So what did he do? Did he go and just announce it? No. First he started talking about it in an offhand way, just glancingly, at press conferences. Then he gave a speech to Congress. Then he did two fireside chats. All of this was building to finally announcing in the State of the Union message this new program. By that time, the people had gotten used to it. He did the very same thing with lend-lease. He knew by the mid-1930s that Hitler was a real problem. This was more than a problem; it was a threat to us. Yet the country was isolationist. So he started talking about this problem, that it was a threat to us and we had to do something; we couldn't just stand by and observe. He started with the quarantine speech in October of 1937, and bit by bit he worked up to his fireside chat of December 29, 1940, which was the famous speech that "We've got to be an arsenal of democracy." Finally, three months later, he introduced legislation and lend-lease was passed, and the rest is history.

The way you advance the ball is not with a new paragraph of rhetoric, but through some new executive action, even allocation of funds or a challenge to some sector of society that takes the same argument for health care and moves it along. The press simply will not cover the same, or even slightly different, eloquence on the same subject unless there's something new, and a lot of what the policy shops did was to find that.

The main lesson is that, with a coordinated White House where people are working together in a sense of teamwork, and where there is a clear objective and the President does have big ideas that he wants to get across to the country, you can, by putting these all together, have a very successful presidency. The President doesn't have to do it all himself. With speech writers, with an Office of Political Affairs, an Office of Public Liaison, people who are representing and providing liaison with various constituency groups, you can have a coordinated White House team that does help to get the President's program across and helps to build the support in the country that will make it effective.

 

Do not separate or keep the speechwriters isolated over in the Old Executive Office Building, and then keep the policymakers separately doing their own thing in the White House and just send messages back and forth.  Do make news. Do have big ideas. Do use all the technology available to you. Do keep it simple. Do devote several hours a day to conducting interviews with journalists. Do, when appropriate, use rhetoric that soars. Do leak. Do make as much information as possible available to journalists, particularly if it's contradictory. We live on that, and it's great stuff. Don't forget the journalists who aren't on the front lines, in the White House or on the campaign trail, because they're looking for things to write about too.

Frequency of Public Speeches.  In a typical year, not running for reelection, in 1997, President Clinton spoke in public 550 times. In a similar typical year, not running for reelection, President Reagan spoke in public 320 times. In a similar year, President Truman spoke in public 88 times.  If you remember when President Nixon resigned, his opening line was, "This is the 39th time I have spoken to you from this office." Now a president has to negotiate with the networks and, very frequently, simply will not get the time. It helps if there is a war; it helps if there is a scandal. But to go on TV and actually talk to the public about policy endless negotiations take place.  It's one of the reasons that the President relishes the State of the Union address, this president, because he knows that he gets to talk uninterrupted to the voters directly about what their government is doing. And he has a lot to say, it goes without saying.

Vital importance of linking speeches and speechwriting on the one hand and policy on the other, with the President in the middle of it. The gravest mistake that any White House can make is to view speeches as merely the way you sell a program, as distinct from and divorced from the formation of the program.  It relates to the vital importance -- and this does sound like special pleading, but it is very important -- of making sure that the speech process and the policy process is not something that is handed to the President, but something he is deeply and intimately involved with.

You need to make news. It would no longer work in this media environment for a president to go out and repeat the same themes, the same philosophical themes, no matter how eloquently, over and over. The press simply, in this day and age, will not cover it. In order to be covered, even the President of the United States needs to make hard news.

Don't keep the speechwriters out of policy or away from the President.

 

Have something big to sell. Advocate big things that will define a presidency, not incremental things that will diminish it.  When they ask CEOs who have successfully turned around major corporations what they would have done differently, almost without fail they say that they wish they had taken larger, more dramatic actions sooner.

A program should be simple to explain. If you cannot explain it in one sentence, rethink it.

The value of intellectual diversity and personalities.  Fill the White House not only with the tactful, pleasant people you need for jobs like congressional or public liaison, but also with crusaders, ideologues, pragmatists, contrarians, reformers, and interesting intellectual and social misfits of various stripes. Republicans and Democrats each have their own established order, which needs to be upset. A White House needs people who can carry on a crusade, because without them, how will a President in this day and age get anything truly great accomplished?

A President should forego the easy grandstanding and build support for his programs by educating the public. Politicians don't seem to educate anymore. A President has to educate people before he can lead them.  Two professors at the University of Pennsylvania studied 200 years of inaugural speeches and then compared them to historians' judgment of each President. One of things they rated in the speech is what they called rumination, defined as the President explaining his thoughts on what the country was up against. Educating. Rumination, when combined with an action orientation in inaugural addresses, was a strong predictor of greatness in a president. So a President should spend less time declaring, pronouncing, and proclaiming and more time educating and, thereby, leading.

Do not allow Balkanization within their White House in this area any more than in any other area. That's true ideologically when, in the case of President Clinton as a new Democrat trying to change the Democratic Party, different factions would contend. It often made for a messy process.  The object is to convince the American people that the President is right, that his program is right, and that you're damn lucky to have him.  The Office of Public Liaison is working very closely with other offices in the White House to build an advocacy program for the President's issues. At the same time, on the other parallel track, it's doing the educating. It's bringing in people for briefings; it's responding to people who ask for briefings; and it's reaching out to constituencies to educate them on those issues. The Office of Public Liaison is the office in the White House that is most functional as a coordinator. You have to work with the congressional liaison people because they are the folks who tell you, in the Office of Public Liaison, the members of Congress who are their targets and, therefore, who are the people who have to be contacted at the local level.

Work in teams. Having a legislative strategy group is an essential part of the Office of Public Liaison in an effort to bring everybody together to advocate in a way that includes everybody.  Clearly, access to the President and the chief of staff is very important. Having a chief of staff who understands the importance of public outreach makes all the difference.

Work the issue when the policy is being formulated. That helps you find out what will sell and who will sell it, as well as to set priorities.

Don't wait to build constituent support until after all the decisions have been made.

Don't let political and advocacy outreach, policy outreach, be Balkanized. One of the problems in White Houses is that various offices in subsequent White Houses often do their own outreach, so that the policy shop, congressional shop and the political shop reach out separately to their own constituencies. That makes it very hard for a good public liaison office to function.  All who come to work at the White House for the President should have one objective in common: to convince and convert people who are skeptics about the President's program to support his agenda.  Of all the offices which are doing that, I think the Office of Public Liaison is the only one that is involved in what I call "grassroots outage" according to what is known as the pegging order, or P-E-G-G: profession, ethnicity, gender, and geography.  Teamwork is very important. Try not to think about the credit so much. The only person who should get the credit should be the President of the United States.

Covering the Transition from Campaigning to Governing
"Transitions -- Past and Present"

"Project your command of the office to the world. Use USIA broadcasts. Distribute material, cables to principal heads of state and heads of government, reassuring in particular Israel, Japan, Western Europe, China, and [Russia]. Plan an early address to the United Nations. Plan an early reception for the Washington diplomatic corps. Schedule a series of reviews of our ambassadors abroad. Meet with the UN Secretary General, the NSC, the secretaries of state and defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA director, the chairman and ranking members of the Senate and House committees on foreign affairs. However, travel abroad would be unwise and unnecessary."

Six recurrent temptations that every new president must resist starting in the transition period, particularly in foreign policy. Not the temptations that have been identified with the presidency. Tendencies might have been a better word. The transition period between election and inauguration, goes back a few months before the election and also extends for a few months after the inauguration is a hazardous time for US foreign policy in particular.  It's a time of uncertainty.  Any time there's a change in leadership and particularly a change of party control in the White House, there is uncertainty and speculation abroad. Foreign heads of state go to remarkable lengths to try to get some idea of what the new administration will do and say.  It's a time of mistrust between the White House and the others in the executive branch, the career people. In particular, it's a time of maneuvering for position. And to some extent, equally dangerous, it's a time of overconfidence on the part of the new president and his team.

First, he must resist the temptation to keep on campaigning. Now that is actually difficult to resist. Campaigning is what the new president has been all about for the years leading up to his election. That's what his staff and his advisers are all about. That's how he got to where he is. And besides, it's a lot easier to make a great speech and point with alarm than to raise serious questions, none of which does you any good in the presidency, whatsoever. Now, you're expected to be coming up with the answers. Scrambling for those daily headlines just won't work anymore. And in foreign policy where everybody is now listening to every word that comes from that president-elect's mouth with a very different attitude, it's a time for caution about what is said and what is done. And the president-elect's obligation is not merely to his party; it's to all Americans.

Second, he must resist the temptation to make change for the sake of change. "Well, why not throw the rascals out; throw their policies, their procedures and their precedents out with them." That can have its own disastrous consequences.  The president-elect is not writing on a clean slate. The obligations of the presidency, of the executive branch of the country that have been written before cannot be simply set aside.

Third, the president-elect must resist the temptation to bring all decision making into the White House, to staff the White House with so many people and to give it so much authority that comparatively little is left for members of the cabinet and agency heads. It's a big mistake, but unfortunately a mistake that's been made repeatedly over the last many presidencies.  The National Security Adviser should be an adviser, he should not be an administrator of programs, and he should not be an operator who conducts operations in foreign policy. He is after all unaccountable to the Congress, he is not confirmed by the Senate, he does not testify as a normal rule, cannot be compelled to testify before the Congress, and unlike the Secretary of State, who was originally intended to be the first among equals in the conduct of foreign policy within the administration, reporting to the president.  If a president is going to select able people, wise counselors to head the departments and agencies of government, he must make sure that they have some discretion and some decision making authority in which to exercise that wisdom.

Fourth the president-elect must resist the temptation to rush into new initiatives. There's nothing like the sense of wonderment when you are elected President of the United States. It's just unbelievable.

It is such a heady time.  You think you have the magic touch. You can't do anything wrong. What a time to take care of X or rush in on Y. It's the worst possible time to do that.  Your advisers do not know each other well enough. Fifth, the new President must resist the temptation to go it alone, without involving allies or the United Nations. It sounds tempting. Consultations with Congress, with allies, with the United Nations take time, encounter difficulties and involve objections, some real, some spurious.

Sixth, the president-elect must resist the temptation to bypass the Congress. If the Congress is going to be difficult, the Congress is going to delay, if the Congress is going to investigate and educate and legislate at great length, which is what Congress is intended to and established to do, then says a typical president-elect, "I'll just bypass the Congress. I'll demonstrate what presidential power and prerogative is all about." That simply is no longer possible, much less wise in foreign affairs, because Congress ultimately does have the power. The Constitution may not be all that clear as to where it divides the foreign affairs authority between the legislative and executive branches but it is clear that the Congress has an opportunity to not only share in that, but to block the actions of a president.

Six pre-election tests by which journalists can start measuring the next president's effectiveness during the campaign. You don't need to wait until the formal transition period begins the day after the election; because there are certain steps that every president-elect must take during that formal transition period. But in a sense all of those steps he is taking during the campaign as well.

First, he's going to have to appoint a cabinet. But the first member of that cabinet is appointed during the campaign-- the vice president. And whether you appoint an Agnew or a Johnson as your running mate, it tells you quite a bit about that future president.

Second, he's going to have to appoint a White House staff, people who are going to have considerable authority, capable of considerable good or considerable mischief.  In the campaign, the would-be president is attracting or trying to attract first-rate men and women to his campaign, putting them in key positions of responsibility. Take a look at those campaign staffs. Take a look at the quality of the people. 

Third, the new president must, during the transition period, organize the government. He must decide how resources, personnel, money, as well as his own time are going to be spent. In a miniaturized sort of way, that's what he's doing during the campaign. How does he husband his resources? How has he allotted his time?

Fourth, at the end of the transition period, the president prepares and delivers his first major address, the inaugural. But there is a major address during the campaign, which is his acceptance speech at the convention.  The inaugural address is important because he's now addressing multiple audiences that he has never addressed before, not just the folks at one political gathering.

John F. Kennedy did perfectly fine as his own chief of staff, as he sometimes said, because there were only a small handful of people reporting to him. I have on my office wall in New York a picture of all the professional staff people in the Kennedy White House. There's about a dozen of us gathered on the steps outside the Oval Office.  You know, to get all the professionals on the White House staff today, you'd need RFK stadium. I don't think they would fit into one picture. And a chief of staff is clearly needed when you have that kind of size to deal with, which I think is a great mistake.  Too many people running around using the president's name and the president's letterhead and the president's telephone and saying that they speak for the president whether they're talking to the press, the Congress, the bureaucracy or whomever, gets you into trouble. And some presidents have gotten into trouble because of that.  President Kennedy had Kenny O'Donnell who coordinated operational questions of hiring and firing in the White House and logistics, transportation, those kinds of staff questions. I functioned in the policy program area. Pierre Salinger on press, Larry O'Brien on legislative, McGeorge Bundy on national security matters. That was essentially it. We each reported to the president without any difficulty.  On the other hand, JFK's predecessor, General Eisenhower, had been accustomed to the chief of staff kind of organization as a general in the army. And, so, that's why I say it's a mistake; Eisenhower would not have operated well with our system, we would not have operated well with Eisenhower's system.

From time to time presidential candidates have said, "I'm going to make the cabinet very important and we'll hold regular meetings and the cabinet will vote on decisions." The truth of the matter is that none of them, to the best of my knowledge, have done so. Why when you are going to decide on your policy of, let's say, agriculture, do you want the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Treasury and other very busy people with very demanding schedules sitting around the table on an issue where they have little or nothing to contribute? And vice versa on foreign policy issues. There are a few issues such at the civil service and the upcoming budget and a few matters of that sort, which are actually of interest to every member of the cabinet; and for those purposes a cabinet meeting is worthwhile. It gives them a good feeling, it's good for unity of the government and it gives everybody a chance to feel they're participating. Probably sends a certain symbol out to the public. But other than that, most cabinet meetings are actually quite boring and not all that useful.

By Edwin Chen

Nov. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Three blocks from the White House, on the 10th floor of a sleek glass building, young workers pound at computers, with giant flat-screen TVs overhead. It has the look and feel of a high-tech startup.

In many ways it is. The product is ideas.

Thanks in part to funding from benefactors such as billionaire George Soros, the Center for American Progress has become in just five years an intellectual wellspring for Democratic policy proposals, including many that are shaping the agenda of the new Obama administration.

Much as the Heritage Foundation provided intellectual heft for the Republican Party in the 1980s, CAP has been an incubator for liberal thought and helped build the platform that triumphed in the 2008 campaign.

``What CAP has done is recapture the role of ideas as an important political force, something the Republicans had been better at for 25 years,'' said Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute, a non-partisan policy-research organization in Washington.

CAP's president and founder, John Podesta, 59, former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, is one of three people running the transition team for president-elect Barack Obama, 47. A squadron of CAP experts is working with them.

Some of the group's recommendations already have been adopted by the president-elect.

Withdrawal of Troops

These include the center's call for a gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and a buildup of forces in Afghanistan, a plan for universal health coverage through employer plans and proposals to create purchasing pools that allow small businesses to spread the cost among a larger group of workers. Obama has endorsed much of a CAP plan to create ``green jobs'' linked to alleviating global climate change.

CAP also is advocating the creation of a ``National Energy Council'' headed by an official with the stature of the national security adviser and who would be charged with ``transforming the energy base'' of the U.S. In addition, CAP urges the creation of a White House ``office of social entrepreneurship'' to spur new ideas for addressing social problems.

To help promote its ideas, CAP employs 11 full-time bloggers who contribute to two Web sites, ThinkProgress and the Wonk Room; others prepare daily feeds for radio stations. The center's policy briefings are standing-room only, packed with lobbyists, advocacy-group representatives and reporters looking for insights on where the Obama administration is headed.

`Premier Progressive'

``The center is the premier progressive think tank in Washington,'' said Mark Green, head of the New Democracy Project, an urban-affairs institute in New York.

Just eight days after the Nov. 4 election, CAP released a 300,000-word volume called ``Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint for the 44th President'' that offers advice on issues such as economic revival and fixing the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Work on the book began almost a year ago.

CAP, which has 180 staffers and a $27 million budget, devotes as much as half of its resources to promoting its ideas through blogs, events, publications and media outreach.

The center's future was far from certain in 2003, when wealthy donors such as Soros and film producer Stephen Bing gave $10 million or more to fill what they believed was an intellectual void in the Democratic Party and create a vehicle to produce an agenda for the party's eventual return to power.

Heritage Foundation

Podesta modeled the center on the Heritage Foundation, which became the go-to policy-research organization in 1981 when newly elected President Ronald Reagan embraced its conservative ideas embodied in a book called ``Mandate for Leadership.'' Heritage was just seven years old.

CAP and Heritage have something else in common.

``Others strive to be objective, we don't,'' said Jennifer Palmieri, CAP's vice president for communications.

Podesta likes to say, ``we're not a think tank, we're an action tank,'' said Dan Weiss, an environmental activist who joined CAP last year.

CAP isn't the only Democratic-leaning research organization in Washington with enhanced cachet after Obama's election.

The 92-year-old Brookings Institution, for example, has advisers in Obama's inner circle, including economist Jason Furman and foreign-policy expert Susan Rice. Others are working either part-time or full-time in the Obama transition.

Podesta's center isn't even among the biggest or best- funded. Brookings has a staff of more than 400 and an annual budget of $48 million. Heritage has a staff of 200 and a budget of $60 million. The American Enterprise Institute, which has close ties to the administration of President George W. Bush, has about 140 staffers, including Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, and a budget of $28 million.

Influence

Yet CAP may be the most influential. In addition to Podesta, at least 10 other CAP experts are advising the incoming administration, including Melody Barnes, the center's executive vice president for policy who co-chairs the agency-review working group and Cassandra Butts, the senior vice president for domestic policy, who is now a senior transition staffer.

``John understood that ideas have power in this town, and he brought in super-bright people whose ideas have become essential reading,'' Isaacson said.

CAP's successes offer a lesson for Republican-leaning groups, said James McGann, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia who tracks policy groups.

``They've shown that one has to constantly innovate and be responsible to an ever-changing demographics and electorate, and have policies that are responsive to that,'' McGann said.

The appointments process has become more torturous than the Founding Fathers ever could have imagined.  In the vision of the Founding Fathers, the United States would be governed by citizen leaders who step out of private life for a term in office, then return to their communities enhanced by the experience and ready to recruit the next generation of citizen servants. The Founders, who themselves left farms, law practices, and businesses to answer their country's call, expected the time spent in government service to be inconvenient, even burdensome. That was part of the obligation to serve.

Future presidents will more rapidly assemble the leadership team necessary to honor the election mandate of the people.  Barack Obama will take the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2009. In fact, if history is any guide, it will be nine or 10 months later before the new president is firmly in control of the government. That is roughly when the last members of his cabinet and subcabinet are likely to complete the presidential appointments process. Only then can the real work of the new administration begin.   Since 1960, every president has taken longer and longer to complete the appointments process. Kennedy's top appointees were not in place until mid-April, Nixon's until mid-May, Carter's until July, Reagan's until August, Bush's until mid-September, and Clinton's until October. The next president will be lucky if his appointees are confirmed by November 1.

The delays reflect many factors, not the least of which is the growing number of positions that require presidential appointment. In 1961, Kennedy filled a grand total of 196 Senate-confirmed appointments. Thirty years later, Clinton had more than 800 to fill. And these figures do not include the growing number of advisory board positions and lesser political posts, which now number in the 5,000 range.

The review process has also grown more onerous and complex with each passing scandal. The number of forms has increased, as has the list of questions and disclosure requirements. Just about the only thing that has not changed is the requirement that the forms be filled out by a typewriter. To this day, executive branch forms are not available either on-line or on disk.

The increasing complexity of the process has reduced the number of talented Americans willing to accept the call to presidential service.  Presidential recruiters report that it takes more calls to find candidates willing to subject themselves to the process, and more work to keep candidates from bolting once the process begins. The number of initial turn downs is rising, as is the number of later withdrawals.


There is already considerable agreement on a short list of reforms that could cut the current delays by several months. These include streamlining of the financial disclosure categories for the president's most senior nominees, and a simplified disclosure form and expedited FBI field investigations for selected nominees further down the Appointee hierarchy.

The delays would be cut even further if the Senate and White House can restore comity to their joint review process. It is not clear whether doing so requires a constitutionally acceptable time limit on the process, or a sharp reduction in the total number of presidential appointments. What is clear is that reducing delays must involve a genuine dialogue between the two branches. We know that delays are not the only reason America's civic and corporate leaders are increasingly reluctant to serve. Public cynicism toward government also plays a significant role.

Although the Founding Fathers most certainly expected the time spent in citizen service to be inconvenient, even burdensome, they did not expect the process of entering office to be so long, intrusive and frustrating. They clearly wanted presidents to make speedy nominations and the Senate to discharge its advice-and-consent function, aye or nay, with equal dispatch.

Two hundred years later, the presidential appointments process is increasingly incapable of fulfilling its most basic responsibility: recruiting talented citizens for government service. More and more citizens are saying no, and those who do say yes are being forced to endure a process that is more torturous than the Founders ever could have imagined.

Reforms can succeed, however, only if leaders on both sides of the aisle come together to make senior service more attractive. In this era of handshakes across the party divide, we can think of no other issue that deserves more bipartisan attention than the need to renew citizen service as a basic democratic duty.   Improving the presidential appointments process would not only help the next president turn to governing as soon as possible after inauguration day, it also would make it easier for all of the nation's elected officials to honor the promises they make. And that is an essential element for rebuilding public confidence in government.  The genuine importance of  government service far transcends the burdensome formalities that must come first.

The president-elect's transition team includes the White House Office of Presidential Personnel, the Office of the Counsel to the President, the Office of Government Ethics, home state Senators (and House members), Senate Committees  of