An Open Letter to the President Elect

Prior to the ratification of the 20th Amendment in 1933, when the candidate won an election, he didn't have to take office until March of the following year. Thus all the time in the world to prepare for taking over. That was then, this is now. Now, the candidate will run non-stop for two years or more for this job, will spend millions of dollars, and once the election has ended, will have no time to catch his breath before it is time to sit in the big chair. And what's worse, there is no longer a honeymoon whereby the new president gets time to learn the position before the system closes in. It used to be 6 months. Now it is 6 minutes. Shortly after taking the oath, President Obama will be held to the 100 day clock, started by FDR, and never repeated since. And he will have to begin to raise money for his second term and the 2012 election.

As bad as it sounds, President-elect Obama does not have to reinvent the wheel. There is a lot of material available that can help him "hit the ground running," as James Pfiffner described the Reagan administration in 1981, and not "hit the ground stumbling" as Stephen Hess described the Clinton administration in 1993.

First up is this "Transition memo" written by Stephen Hess, of the Brookings Institute, which serves as an appetizer, piquing the new president's interest enough to look deeper. His recommendations:

• Resist the temptation to reorganize--there will be great pressures, as the candidate for change, to shake things up inside the Executive Branch. Hess warns this might invite more trouble than it is worth if not carefully thought through.
• Resist the pressure to appoint friends to high places--All President-elect Obama need to read about this is the "Georgia Mafia" that Jimmy Carter brought with him on Inauguration Day 1977. Almost none had any ideal how things worked.
• If you offer a job to someone and they resist or say no, best to leave it at that and not pressure them to take the job (one wonders if this is the case with the new chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel?). Hess refers to Paul O'Neill, Bush's pick as Treasury secretary. He provided a list of reasons why he should not be the Treasury secretary, and when he was sacked two years later, it was for those reasons.
• Be certain you know the skeletons in the closets of your potential nominees, and even if you do your best to carefully vet and it appears that the nominee runs into trouble in the Senate, cut them loose rather than burning capital on a fight. Both Bush 41 and Clinton ran into trouble with high profile nominees who in the end were rejected by the Senate--for Bush 41 it was John Tower, the pick for Defense and for Clinton it was Zoe Baird.
• Don't give major policy responsibility to someone who cannot be fired. Hess is refering here to health care reform in 1993, which Clinton handed to his wife and nearly doomed his presidency. Actually, when you compare Monica Lewinsky and impeachment to the health care reform disaster, it was the latter that came closest to ruining Clinton.

I would add a couple more things.

I would dig up and adapt the Heritage Foundation's Mandate for Leadership, which was written for the in-coming Reagan administration in 1981. Granted, Heritage is a conservative organization and Reagan was a conservative president, but the central message of the publication is bipartisan. Mandate urged Reagan to take control of the bureaucracy at the moment the Marine Band begins to play "Hail to the Chief" on January 20. Reagan's transition team was responsible for vetting any political appointee to make sure that he or she was a true believer. In fact, Pendelton James and Lyn Nofziger had a six point list to weed the good from the bad:

1. Are you a a Carter appointee? If so, you are gone.
2. Are you a Democrat who worked for Reagan? If so, you are gone.
3. Are you a Republican? Are you the best Republican for the job?
4. Are you a Ronald Reagan-George H.W. Bush supporter?
5. Did you work in the Reagan-Bush campaign? How early before the convention?
6. Are you the best qualified person for the job?

The "best qualified" question was the last question asked. It was more important to place the most dedicated partisan into important bureaucratic positions than placing the best qualified. Former Reagan attorney general Ed Meese argued:

We sought to ensure that all political appointees in the agencies were vetted through the White House personnel process, and to have a series of orientation seminars for all high-ranking officials on the various aspects of the Reagan program. We wanted our appointees to be the President's ambassadors to the agencies, not the other way around.

This is something that every president since Reagan has understood. Failure to gain early control over the bureaucratic process can lead to major problems down the road--bureaucratic inertia can be the death of any president, regardless of what his public approval numbers are.

The new president should also be cautioned not to jettison Bush's orders simply because they were his orders. For example, President Bush issued Executive Order 13,422 in early 2007 that gave the White House even greater leverage over the bureaucracy. 13,422 is an extension of several orders that began in the Reagan administration and were modified in the Clinton administration. This order both gives significant management authority to the Office of Management and Budget--the "enforcer" of the president's will in the bureaucracy--and it puts a set of eyes and ears in the form of "Regulatory Policy Officers" right into the key bureaucratic agencies. In the Reagan and Clinton administrations, where the president stood on an issue often was subtle--in the ether. Bush's order makes the president's wishes overt by putting his people right over the shoulders of these bureaucrats.

This leaves me with my final bit of advice. I know that you eschewed the use of the signing statement and other unilateral devices while on the campaign. That is fine. But now that you are getting ready to govern, it is time you take out the keys and open up the cabinet and learn what these devices do, because at some point you will need to use them. These devices include the signing statement, executive orders, presidential proclamations and memoranda, and each can be useful in securing political objectives that are either too contentious or not likely to be considered by the Congress. While the general public doesn't pay much attention to these things (unless of course you abuse them), specialized interest groups do, and you can get a lot of mileage by deploying them every so often.

Case in point. In 1996, President Clinton was unable to gain concessions on an environmental bill that was important to various environmental organizations that supported the administration. In a signing statement, President Clinton mentioned that he was disappointed that the Congress would not work with him on this important provision and would continue to work to gain concessions in future bills. One of the key environmental groups sent a letter to its members on the loss, but also in support of Clinton, who mentioned their cause in his signing statement. A little goes a long way. Take the current president. When he came to office in 2001, one of his important constituents was evangelicals, who had been pushing to gain access over the distribution of federal money that goes to charitable organizations. In every attempt by the congressional Republicans during the Clinton years was knocked down via veto threat or veto because Clinton believed it violated the First Amendment. Bush promised not just to release federal money to churches who do charity work, but also to create an "Office of Faith Based Initiatives" that would reach out from the White House to the religious communities. When he tried to get Congress to create such an office, he ran into a wall. Thus he turned to the executive order, and created an Office of Faith Based Initiatives over a week after taking office.

Thus I am sure Mr. Obama is getting alot of advice, and I would end by urging him to look to recent history to understand where potential landmines lay ahead. What happens in these first few months of his presidency can spell the different between success and failure.