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A president doesn't just
need good ideas,
he needs to know how to make the government hum. He must know how to keep
abreast of significant developments in agencies like the IRS and the EPA.
He needs to know how to keep the bureaucratic chain of command from
preventing him from finding out about serious problems before they turn
into major scandals and from filtering out good ideas before they can
become solutions. It helps if the candidate has worked in the executive
branch and learned to understand the culture of the vast bureaucracy he
will oversee as president. The greatest president of this century,
Franklin Roosevelt, had served for eight years as assistant secretary of
the Navy under Woodrow Wilson. The assistant secretary level is a crucial
action point in government where policy makers interact with the career
employees who carry out their policies. And at the Navy department, FDR
learned to deal with both military and civilian bureaucrats. Dwight
Eisenhower rose through the ranks of the army to a top command over the
combined services, so while he lacked FDR's experience with the civilian
side, he was perhaps our most sophisticated president in dealing with the
military. He could sense when his former colleagues were telling him the
truth and when they were hustling him. According to presidential
historian Fred Greenstein, a successful president must be able to both
build an effective team and develop institutional structures that can get
him the information that he needs. He's got to inspire people who are
loyal and, crucially, he's got to figure out a way that he can get them to
tell him the truth, constantly reminding himself that bad news dilutes
itself as it travels up the command chain. A large part of FDR's
success came because he was a master at finding out what was really going
on in government. For example, he sent his wife, Eleanor, and her dear
friend, Lorena Hickok, to nose around government programs like the WPA and
find out where workers were swinging their hammers and where they were
sitting by the side of the road. When he wanted to know what Churchill was
thinking, he didn't rely solely on the American Ambassador, Joseph
Kennedy, he sent Harry Hopkins and Averell Harriman to talk to the prime
minister and assess the morale of Britain during the Blitz. Al Gore
alone among the top four candidates has extensive experience in the
federal executive branch. He has been vice president for eight years and
has been far more involved in White House decision-making than most of his
predecessors. By running the Reinventing Government operation, he has had
an unprecedented opportunity to learn about the agencies he will oversee
as president. He has succeeded in achieving a substantial reduction in the
size of the bureaucracy, something Nixon, Reagan, and Bush talked about
but were unable to accomplish. And he has both improved the way the
government purchases goods and modernized its information technology. His
most serious failure was that he didn't come to grips with the problem of
getting rid of incompetent and mediocre civil servants. The reductions
made by Reinventing Government were not based on merit but on attrition,
buyouts, and other techniques not likely to rile the government employees'
union. Bush would like everyone to think that being governor of Texas
has prepared him for the oval office, frequently making the point that:
"Well, I'm the one person who has been a chief executive outside of
Washington." Texas is a big state, but being governor of it is not
comparable to being president. A governor can walk around the capitol
building and run into department heads and their subordinates every day.
He can walk down the street and meet average citizens every day. The state
employees and the citizens can tell him about problems he should face. A
president is insulated from these encounters so he doesn't find out unless
he uses Eleanor Roosevelts, Lorena Hickoks, Averell Harrimans, and Harry
Hopkinses to find out for him. Jimmy Carter also thought being governor
was all the experience he needed and look what happened to him.
McCain's only executive branch experience was in the military and it
did not include anything resembling Eisenhower's command experience.
Neither he nor Bradley has ever worked in the civilian executive branch.
And Bradley's only military service was in the reserves. So, between the
two, McCain has the advantage of at least having been sufficiently
involved in the military to understand its culture.
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