Assessing the Bush Transition

Tuesday, January 16, 2001

Unedited transcript prepared from a tape recording.

Introduction
Norman Ornstein	American Enterprise Institute
Thomas Mann	Brookings Institution
Alvin Felzenberg	Heritage Foundation
Panelists
C. Boyden Gray	Former White House counsel to President Bush
Thomas F. "Mack" McLarty	Former chief of staff to President Clinton
Hon. Edwin Meese	Former attorney general and counselor to President Reagan
Jack Watson	Former chief of staff and transition director for President Carter

Proceedings:

MR. ORNSTEIN: --and also co-director of the Transition to Governing Project. My fellow co-director, Tom Mann, of the Brookings Institution at the other podium will speak in just a minute or two.

Welcome to our panel on "Assessing the Bush Transition." It is one in a long series of panels and other projects which we have conducted through the Transition to Governing Project, which has been ongoing now for the better part of a year and a half, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and done in conjunction with both the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution. John Fortier, who directs the project, is sitting here in the front row.

We carried through the campaign a series of programs on how the candidates would govern, looking carefully at their background experiences and the dynamics of their campaigns and what it would bring to the governing process, a part of this larger project which has been trying to turn the focus a little bit away from the permanent campaign, which we've come to know too well and perhaps more so through the 2000 campaign than ever before back to a bit of a focus on governing and to look at the transition itself.

We thought we would be able to hit the ground running on November 8, and it took 36 days thereafter before we actually had the beginning of a transition, and we also will focus on the whole appointment, nomination and confirmation process for people in government.

I'd like to just briefly mention an event we have coming up next Thursday, January 25, here in the same place from 10:00 to noon. One of the things we've done in this project is to commission a piece of software which we believe will work as a kind of equivalent of combination of Turbo-Tax and the college application software for all executive appointees--
[Laughter.]

MR. ORNSTEIN: --to help carry through what has become an absolutely ridiculous process of filling out forms, all of which have had to be done on typewriter and separately and a morass of regulations involving them. We will unveil this software and talk a little bit about some of the problems that people have coming in who want to serve in government and the obstacles before they can get in place.

Let me just briefly mention as well a couple of books that we have produced as a part of this project which are out in the lobby, for those of you who would like to look at them and purchase them: "The Permanent Campaign and Its Future," a set of essays that Tom and I pulled together and edited on the whole nature of the permanent campaign and, very appropriate for today's discussion, "Preparing to Be President," the memos of Richard E. Neustadt, edited by Charles O. Jones; the various transition memos authored by our greatest living presidential scholar.

We will continue on through this transition through the early part of the new presidency and assess it along the way.

For our program today, we are also joined in sponsorship by the Heritage Foundation, which has conducted its own very impressive transition studies, and let me turn just briefly for a word to one of our panelists, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation who directs their Mandate for Leadership Project, Al Felzenberg.

MR. FELZENBERG: Thank you, Norm. It's good to be here. It's good to see so many familiar faces. As Norm said, the Heritage Foundation has done a series of programs on transitions. They're in many, many parts. Some of you have been to some of our events. We have a book that I have edited, which I hope you can look at later. Some of you probably have it already. It's called "Keys to a Successful Presidency."

What we have done is we have summarized advice that advisors to the past eight presidents, going from John Kennedy through Bill Clinton, have told us about what things that past transitions have gotten right; things they've gotten wrong; ways in which the new administration can learn from past successes and, hopefully, avoid past mistakes.

We have another book coming called "Priorities for a New Administration," which should be out later in the month, and that is our take not just on the major issues that the new President will face but how he might go about achieving them.

So with that said, I want to thank you all for coming, and I look forward to an exciting program, and it's our great honor to be cosponsoring this with AEI and Brookings.

Thank you.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Thanks very much, Al.

Let me just briefly introduce our panelists and then turn it over to Tom Mann.

Going from the far end next to Tom, Thomas "Mack" McLarty is the chairman of McLarty Companies and vice-chairman of Kissinger McLarty Associates. He is known to virtually everybody in this audience, of course, for his service as President Clinton's chief of staff; serving as counselor to the President and then as special envoy for the Americas, serving for 5 years in the President's cabinet and as a member of the National Economic Council.

He has not only long service within the Democratic Party but also, unlike many at these top levels in the Executive Branch, actually has elective experience, having been elected to the state legislature at the ripe age of 23 and also served as chairman of his state's Democratic Party; a major and successful business executive as well and somebody very comfortable in the worlds of ideas, commerce and of governance.

Boyden Gray is a partner at the law firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. He has also served as director of the transition council for the Bush transition team; White House Counsel to President Bush from 1989 to the end of that Presidential term; before that, back at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering and has also been very much actively involved in regulatory issues and a whole series of other substantive policy issues and serves, in addition, as chairman of Citizens for a Sound Economy.

Jack Watson served as the head of President Carter's transition team; served as assistant to President Carter for intergovernmental affairs; secretary to the cabinet and White House chief of staff; is the former chief legal strategist of Monsanto Company; before that, a senior partner in a major Atlanta law firm and now living life as a country baron.

[Laughter.]

MR. ORNSTEIN: In Philmont, Virginia, is that right?

And Al Felzenberg, as I mentioned, not only a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation but also served as a staff director of the Empowerment Subcommittee of the House Small Business Committee; professional staff member on the District of Columbia Subcommittee of the House Governmental Reform Committee and was executive director of the President's Commission on the Federal Appointments Process during the Bush administration.

So we have a group of people very much experienced in transitions and in governance, and now, my codirector, Tom Mann.

MR. MANN: Thank you, Norman.

I'd like to add my thanks to our participants and my welcome to all of you for joining us this morning. It's been a distinct pleasure to work with Norm and have our two institutions, AEI and Brookings, collaborate on this Transition to Governing Project.

It seems to have spawned or at least occurred together with a whole host of efforts in this town and around the country to prepare for the transition. Indeed, if the number and quality of reports and books on transition are an indicator of the success of the actual transition that follows, this should certainly be the best ever. There have been a lot of efforts to distill knowledge from past transitions and see if it isn't possible to avoid some of the more egregious mistakes that have been made in the past.

Now, we know that Clay Johnson, who has had responsibility for President-elect Bush, before that, Governor Bush for transition planning has actually read these books and reports--

[Laughter.]

MR. MANN: --which is a little shocking in and of itself. So we're to blame if they run into any problems.

But what that tells us is that the Bush transition planning effort began very early, as we all had been arguing throughout 2000; certainly, initial discussions as far back as 1999 and serious efforts underway before the election and during that long, long period after the election before we knew who our new President would be.

But alas, as Norman suggested, the real world has a way of intervening on the best of plans in very unexpected ways. We released this book on the permanent campaign a week or so before the election. We thought we had everything covered, right, Norm? We had the campaign period; we had the governing period; we even had something on the transition period. What we didn't anticipate was a counting period, in which the permanent campaign would be in full mode.

But alas, it was there. George W. Bush has been elected under the most extraordinary of circumstances, certainly ranking with the election of 1876. He is only the fourth president to have been elected without winning a plurality of the popular vote. He has the second-narrowest margin in the electoral vote, and we have the controversies surrounding Florida and the Supreme Court.

In any case, what this has done, it seems to me, is two things: one, it's radically shortened the formal transition period, and it's raised some questions about what the impact of the fragile nature of the election mandate should have, might have, on the transition planning and on the kickoff to the new administration.

Now, we're only a few days away from President-elect Bush's inauguration. It's certainly too early to issue definitive judgments or report cards on the success of the transition effort, but it's not too early for an initial reading, to take some time with experienced and wise veterans of past transitions, to discuss what makes for good transitions and what we can tell thus far of how the Bush transition is proceeding.

We know there are two sets of lessons from past transitions. One are generic. They really apply to all new presidents. They really go to personnel issues, to matters of structure within the White House and the administration more generally; to the importance of the agenda; to the nature of the image of the new president. But alas, lessons must also be specific to the person, to the new president coming into office; to his style of decision making; to his experience; to his agenda and, importantly, to the context in which he is being elected.

Dick Neustadt has cautioned presidents-elect about the hazards of transition. He summarizes those in terms of hubris, ignorance, time pressure and the Ethics in Government Act.

[Laughter.]

MR. MANN: And with the latter, he would probably combine the politics of Presidential appointment confirmation, which took on a different character after the battle over Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court.

But Dick Neustadt has also outlined a series of tasks for the transition period, and I thought I would mention those, because that might provide some focus for the discussion that ensues. Number one, he argues that the President-elect most importantly needs rest, and he needs to rest and to read and to really prepare for the contrast between the campaign period, which is exhausting, and the governing period, which will be of a very different character.

He needs to assemble his White House staff, preferably first, and department heads and to set up procedures for selecting the subcabinet.

Number four, it's time to prioritize campaign promises. Which are most important? What order should they be pursued? Must they be altered at all because of the nature of the election? It's an important time to nurse and feed the press corps.

Number six, it's a time to initiate contacts with Congress, both the party leadership in the majority and the minority as well as strategic members.

Numbers seven and eight are equally important. It's time to plan the first three to four to five months, whether it's 100 days or 180 days. That means both the legislative agenda and the administrative agenda, which will be so important to this new president.

Finally, it is a time to help shape and, if you will, enlarge the public image of the President-elect. It's time to try to move from a very conflictual election, especially this election, to a period in which the president might be viewed differently by the country as a whole.

These are the tasks; those are the hazards that Dick Neustadt has warned about. What I would like to do is conclude and raise a question with our panel by posing sort of three particular matters with the Bush transition: number one, as we know, his cabinet appointees were greeted initially with sort of Powell and Rumsfeld and O'Neill nominations very favorably. And then, we had three exceedingly controversial nominees, one of which has been withdrawn; two difficult hearings lie ahead. Question to the panel: was this fight necessary? Was it useful? Was it an intelligent thing to pick this fight? And what impact might it have on these other tasks of transition that Dick Neustadt has identified?

Secondly, with respect to the legislative agenda, President-elect Bush has given no quarter on the shape and size of his tax cut. Is this a wise sort of strategic move, don't make any initial concessions, because you know you're going to have to bargain later on, or do you set yourself up for a legislative defeat by sticking so strongly to a measure that has little likelihood of passing in its present form?

And the third question really goes to the way in which President-elect Bush has approached the nature of his very close election. There were two choices. One, in some way, was to try, was to openly acknowledge the nature and closeness of the vote and to try to ameliorate some of those who feel most aggrieved by it. The other was to broadly assert his authority, as past presidents have done, and basically show no concession to the nature of the election contest.

President-elect Bush obviously chose the latter. Was that a wise decision in moving into this transition period? Those are the three sort of broad issues that I hope we will touch on, but I'd like Jack Watson, if he would, to begin on the personnel side. That is, what can we tell from the initial appointments, White House, cabinet, subcabinet and process of how the Bush transition is doing?

MR. WATSON: Thank you, Tom.

I think that President-elect Bush is off to a good start. I know that we have the Ashcroft hearing looming large beginning today, and I know that there is going to be, if all the reports are credible, considerable questioning of former Senator Ashcroft's fitness for the job of attorney general.

I applaud it because, though I am a Democrat, George W. Bush is my president, as he is all of our president. So I applauded his quick and early step to name Andrew Card as his White House chief of staff. He made that decision early and with great clarity as to what Andy's responsibilities would be as chief of staff. I agree with Dick Neustadt's counsel that as early as possible designation and allocation of clear responsibilities among the people in the senior White House staff is a very, very important first step or first and second step, and George W. Bush appears to be doing that well.

I also just want to make the point, Tom, though I hope we'll have more opportunity this morning to talk about this from all of our perspectives, and that is that the presidential appointment and confirmation process, as it presently operates, is broken. It needs fixing. And it needs fixing whether the president is a Republican or a Democrat. The fix of a broken confirmation process, where there is far--in my opinion--far too much invasion into private and personal matters which do not go with strong relevance to the fitness for office criterion which should be the overriding criterion for examination.

We don't need full-field FBI investigations on everybody appointed by the president. We just don't. And we need to prescribe with greater clarity and higher standards the nature of the full-field investigation that the FBI conducts on those on whom it should be conducted.

These are matters which must be handled in a bipartisan way. I sincerely hope, as a Democrat, that the Democrats will join with the Republicans in Congress to address these issues in a sensible and bipartisan way, because if they do, the Bush administration will be the better for it.
I'll stop there.

MR. MANN: Boyden, would you address the personnel issue, how it's going so far, the way they proceeded, the nature of the appointments and the question about the controversial nominees as to whether the fight was necessary and/or useful?

MR. GRAY: I think they've done remarkably well given the time constraints. I'm really amazed having been through it myself twice, once not quite as intensely, in 1980 and one in 1988 and then seeing it on the outgo in 1992. I'm stunned at how well they've done.

The one caveat to that is that they've used people--I mean, they've designated people who, by and large, have been around the track more than once, which has allowed them to make these appointments quickly. It may not be so easy going when you get to the second and third levels, where you're bringing in new people who've never done this before and never filled out these awful forms before and who--even Elaine Chao has been through it before. I talked to her yesterday. She and her husband are spending the entire weekend with paper just strewn all over the floor in every conceivable room.

Poor Mitch McConnell. He's been an I don't know how many term Senator he is. He's filling out more forms as the spouse-to-be than he's ever filled out--

[Laughter.]

MR. GRAY: --for anything he's ever run for.

MR. MANN: Well, maybe he'll support one reform at least.

[Laughter.]

MR. GRAY: And I just put in a word that there are lots of proposals to deregulate the ethics regime. I put in a pitch always for the ABA overseeing a proposal put together under the leadership of Sally Katzen with Steve Breyer and Alan Morris and Ralph Nader's guy on it, a whole political spectrum represented. It needs legislation. I think it would be a great way to really put a stamp on this in a bipartisan fashion, to decriminalize the ethics regime, which allows such games to be played with this nomination process.

On your second question about are these fights necessary? I think the fights are ritual. I mean, I don't think you can ever get away with no fights. The society is; the country is culturally divided. It's not necessarily bad that we have these fights. The fights should be fair, however. I'm not sure they always are. Let's watch and see whether the Ashcroft hearings are fair. There are issues that can be debated passionately between strongly opinionated sides which don't have to get into personal destruction, and I hope that that is avoided. I think it can be avoided, and I do not think these fights are, as a philosophical matter, fights that one should shy away from just because you want to heal.

I mean, I don't really know what heal means. I mean, elections are elections, and there's a winner, and there's a loser, and the winner's got to put his stamp on his win. And to say that this thing was a tie and, you know, all right, so, yes, very, very close, but remember: if Senator Coverdell hadn't unexpectedly died, and he was a relatively young man, there would be no question about the control of the Senate.

MR. MANN: But, Mack, the election was exceedingly close. Gore won the popular vote. Popular vote doesn't count. I understand; candidates don't campaign for the popular vote; narrow electoral vote majority; George W. Bush said he wanted to be a unifier, not a divider. But he picked John Ashcroft, who is at one end of the ideological spectrum within the Republican Party. Was that a wise move, given the context within which Mr. Bush is moving into the White House?

MR. MCLARTY: Well, Tom, first of all, let me thank AEI and Brookings and the Heritage Foundation for sponsoring this effort, and I'm delighted to be a part of it with a very distinguished panel.

I think a couple of points: first, I, too, give President-elect Bush high marks on his appointments to date in the transition. I think any candidate that essentially runs as a centrist, whether it's a compassionate conservative or a new Democrat, is faced with this fundamental choice of how do you develop that vital center in your cabinet? Democratic, it's usually on the liberal side; Republican, on the conservative side.

I think he has to be absolutely true to what he believes in, and if he believes John Ashcroft is the best person he can choose to be attorney general who will accept this appointment--I mean, the process, you never quite know for sure were there other people considered and other people, perhaps, asked to serve who could not? Not necessarily saying that's the case here; then, I think he needed to make that appointment, and I think Boyden hit the right notes in terms of the fairness of the confirmation process.

I would note, however, that while there may be a ritual, and campaigns are always competitive, that in our case, in 1993, and I personally reached out to Senator Lott, who was the Republican point person in the Senate, which was clearly controlled by the Republicans, we did get our cabinet in place without any serious cabinet fights other than the Zoe Baird issue, which, of course, the Bush administration encountered a similar issue.

So we did not have quite the bruising confirmation fights, I must say, in 1993, and I think we got our cabinet in place, I believe, in record time with that one exception in the modern presidency. So I'm not sure it's inevitable. I would take a small exception to my good friend Boyden Gray on that.

MR. MANN: Al, would you address the personnel issue?

MR. FELZENBERG: Yes, a couple of things: I think they moved very quickly on the White House. There were a lot of discussions about past administrations that spent a lot of time working on the cabinet. Some that come to mind are the Nixon administration; to some extent, when I've read about it, the Clinton administration; maybe Mack can fill us in more, and Jack can talk more about Carter.

But many presidents, because the expectation is the cabinet will be representative of different interest groups, whether it looks like America or represents all the pros and cons of the president's coalition, one way or another. They seemed to come in with a real sense of what the White House staff is going to look like first and foremost. And it becomes very clear to one if you just saw the movie Thirteen Days, as I have, when there's a problem, you don't go out and call the Secretary of Agriculture to come to the White House. You turn to the guy next to you.
And in that particular administration, it was a Sorenson, or it was an O'Donnell or people like that. They did spend time with that. They wanted people who were comfortable with each other. They wanted to build a team. They did it well.

Regarding the cabinet, you know, there were all of these questions about originally and how much it's going to look like George Bush, Sr.'s administration; how much it's going to look like Jerry Ford's administration now and many, many others. Many presidents go back to past successes within their own party in trying to recruit. George W. Bush is no exception, and I would say that it's a George W. Bush administration. I said all along: you're going to see some of the newer faces coming out of some of the domestic departments, areas where governors have a lot of experience; they call other governors for ideas; they interact with the National Governors Association, where Bill Clinton was such a star, and talking to other people along the way from states that have ideas that are working.

I always said that when he got his national security team in place, you're going to see some new faces coming out from the states, and you are getting that.

I want to say one thing about the size of the win. You know, once again, Kennedy comes to mind. I mean, I don't know if he was talking about popular or electoral votes when he said a victory by one vote is a mandate, and he went ahead and acted that way. And if you look at the things that he pushed very, very early, yes, he said half the country voted for somebody else, which is probably why that whole inaugural address spoke about foreign policy, because those were things that he and Nixon pretty much agreed on.

But there were things that he campaigned on, and he pushed very, very hard: the space shot; the Alliance for Progress; the Peace Corps; test ban treaties; tax cuts; beginnings of Medicare; some civil rights things. Those are things that you saw him talking about in 1960 that Nixon was not running on. He felt he had an obligation to people who voted for him to push it.

And so does Bush. We're hearing a lot now about education. We're hearing a lot about entitlement reform. We're hearing a lot about taxes, and we're hearing a lot about missile defense. These are things he ran on. These are things he's trying to push that will help shape the debate.

Before I yield back, let me just point out that Bush, like Kennedy, is following a long line of very effective presidents: Woodrow Wilson, 42 percent. If you look into the campaign that he ran against Teddy Roosevelt, the whole New Freedom was there. It was outlined. FDR, 1932; there's a wonderful book that I recommend called "Working with Roosevelt," by his speechwriter, Sam Rosenman. He traced 12 New Deal agencies to speeches Franklin Roosevelt gave in that campaign.

Kennedy, I mentioned. Ronald Reagan; no surprises that he came in and cut taxes; no surprises that he came in and increased the size of the military. These are things that he ran on. People could have disagreed with him on the policy, but they were not surprised. I think Bush is following a long line.

I yield back.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Okay; well, we've already raised, obviously, a lot of issues here, and we will come back to, I'm sure, the strategy of the choice of a cabinet among other things. I would like to pursue a couple of areas here, one in particular, and that is the structure of the White House staff. Now, Jack said correctly that practically the first--well, certainly, the first personnel decision that he made once he became a President-elect and practically the first decision that he announced was the choice of Andy Card as the chief of staff.

At the same time, what we've seen in the weeks since is a different kind of structure of the White House than one which is sharply pyramidical with a clear, single staff leader at the top. Indeed, it appears as if the Bush vision of a White House structure is a bit more like the Reagan structure at the beginning of his presidency, a tripod, three leaders, each of whom is given clear areas of responsibility, and it's not clear that Card will necessarily be first among equals here, but there appear to be three equals.

So let me start with Boyden, who can remember back to that Reagan era, when we had something quite similar in a lot of ways. We had a chief of staff appointed, Jim Baker, who had not been particularly close to the President-elect during a long, earlier period; in fact, had been associated with his rival, George Bush, along with two intimates from California, Mike Deaver and Ed Meese.

How does he compare that beginning to this one? Do you think that Bush has a real vision of the structure here? Can it work the same way that Reagan's did? Will Andy Card ultimately emerge as Jim Baker did? And if not, will it work?

MR. GRAY: Every president is going to do it slightly differently, and there's no road map you can impose, as smart as you may be, to tell a president how he's going to run his White House. And, in fact, he may not really know himself until he gets in the groove or she. It's not that easy to predict. Now, Baker did a phenomenally good job as chief of staff in the Reagan first term, and his excellence made the Reagan first term a very, very productive term.

But there is a toll that power sharing takes on the participants, and I think they all were quite ready to move on after the first term, and they all did move on into different positions. It's very useful for the president, though, to have that kind of thing. Roosevelt loved to set his staff against the staff, and this is a well-understood model.

I don't think Baker, Meese and Deaver enjoyed themselves perhaps as much as they might have, and I have a feeling that you may find the same thing true in this White House. But the person who counts here is the president, not the sensitivities of the staff who have to kind of jockey.

I remember Sununu's sometimes dictatorial behavior. I'm not sure it always served the White House as well when he was more open-minded. He would sometimes vacillate back and forth between styles. But I think the important point is the president is the one we've got to worry about and the function of the White House as a whole not the sensitivities of an individual.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Okay; Mack, why don't you address this? Because it's not even perhaps so much the sensitivities of the individuals but whether an operation in which you have no clear-cut lines of authority can work.

We know in the Reagan White House that it quickly emerged that everybody pretty much acknowledged that Baker was going to be the one in charge. At least two of the three: Deaver certainly accepted and even embraced it. It was a little tougher, I think, with Ed Meese.
But here, we have Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, two extremely strong-willed individuals with these long personal relationships with the President. Can this work?

MR. MCLARTY: Norm, I think it can, and I suspect it will. Andy Card, I think, whom I know relatively well, was actually the transition person in 1993 is, I think, a very capable, experienced professional. And I think that while Ms. Hughes and Mr. Rove have demonstrated strong skills and very close relationship to Governor Bush, now President-elect Bush, I think it can work.
I don't think there's any perfectly right or wrong structure. It clearly depends on what the president feels like he needs at a particular point in time.

Our situation, actually, was somewhere probably in the middle, from Jack, the Carter years, where President Carter came to office with no chief of staff named, and the Reagan and Bush years, to some extent, which had had probably, perhaps, too much centralization of authority with Don Regan and Governor Sununu at least in perception. So the honest broker was a term we heard about a lot.

I think the real essence of our first year, of course, was the economy and the economic plan. And I think Dick Neustadt has also commented about the loyalty of the cabinet and the staff of President Clinton. That was not to say that there was not some unevenness and mistakes made. So I think it depends on the time and place and certainly the president.

But as far as this approach, my hunch is that Andy Card will do quite a good job.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Let me ask you now about some of the management style that President-elect Bush showed at the beginning with regard to his cabinet. He clearly is a delegator, and it appears that his style coming in was to pick strong and strong-willed cabinet people and give them a significant amount of authority to act, in some ways, in management style, similar to Jack Welch at GE, who picked very strong people to head up units like GE Capital, GE Medical Devices and NBC and give them a significant amount of free rein.

Do you see this as, first of all, working at all cabinet levels? Does this mean that if John Ashcroft gets confirmed that Ashcroft will have a tremendous amount of leeway to pick his subordinates and to set his priorities? And ultimately, how much authority can you cede to a cabinet given a strong-willed White House staff and also the need for a president to rather firmly set priorities among and between these cabinet offices?

Jack?

MR. WATSON: One of the most interesting things to watch here, in my opinion, is the emerging role of Dick Cheney as vice-president. Dick Cheney is a man with formidable background and experience in the legislative branch and the executive branch. As everyone knows, he was chief of staff to President Ford. He served 8 or 10 years in the Congress; I don't recall. He served as Secretary of Defense under President Bush. He has operated as a chief executive officer in the private sector.

Dick Cheney, who is a man I know well and have known well for 24 years, since I met him in the chief of staff's office in 1976, a few days after the election, is a man of considerable ability and experience. I suggest to you that it's possible--remains to be seen, of course--but it is possible that Dick Cheney, given President-elect Bush's predilections as a delegator and the other things that we know or believe about him as governor, that Cheney's role will be uniquely operational; that he could, in fact, operate de facto as a kind of chief operating officer of the United States Government from his role as vice-president, which, though the role of vice-president has enhanced considerably in the last few terms, starting with Walter Mondale under Carter, could be a uniquely powerful role in American history for this vice-president.

So let's watch that with real interest.

A couple of other quick points: the presidential spokesperson, the press secretary, no matter who the chief of staff is and no matter what the chief of staff's role in relationship with respect to the president are, is always a very important and prominent high-profile figure in a White House. Jody Powell was that for us. There was no one in our White House, not me as a senior assistant to the president and ultimately White House chief of staff; not Hamilton Jordan, who was my predecessor for a brief period as the chief of staff.

None of us had any closer relationship with President Carter than Jody Powell did. That didn't mean for us, and it doesn't mean for President Bush, George W. Bush, that Andy Card doesn't have the potential and the opportunity here to emerge as a strong chief of staff. Karl Rove is going to have, it would certainly appear, a very strong role as will Karen Hughes, each in their own respective areas.

But someone, we have learned over years, really has to be in charge of the operation of the White House chief of staff; the process; and the processes and procedures that it employs, and that role really must fall to a chief of staff. It would be my prediction that the delegation of authority to do that will be sufficient from President George W. Bush to Andy Card to make it work.

MR. MANN: Norm, could I just underscore a point that Jack made and raise a question for everyone to address? It's really about Dick Cheney's role. There's been a lot of use of the term prime minister for Dick Cheney. It strikes me that Jack has it right, and that was wrong; that is, chief operating officer makes a whole lot more sense, because a prime minister is actually head of government, and the rest is royalty.

It seems to me that George W. Bush shows every sign of having plenty of self-confidence; a desire to exert authority and make decisions; but also a style of delegating authority, and that seems to me a set of characteristics uniquely suited to a chief operating officer, and I'd like to see whether Boyden and Al and Mack share that perception and whether they could speculate about the kind of role that Dick Cheney will play and the nature of the relationship between Bush and Cheney, suggesting whether or not it will hold over the long haul.

Boyden?

MR. GRAY: Let me give a little background. This may sound counterintuitive, and I may be exaggerating to make the point, but I think it's important. Go back to the Reagan first term. I will argue that Vice-President Bush had, for the first two or three years, the same if not more power that it appears Cheney may be given by the second President Bush.

How so? Well, there was a lot of turmoil, you will recall, in the foreign policy; Secretaries of State changing hands; NSC advisors changing hands, and until Schultz came in and established his position about three years into it, two and a half years into it, the fact is that Vice-President Bush was de facto NSC advisor and Secretary of State. That is the reality.

And when he went to Europe to campaign for the Pershing missile deployment, and he came back, there was a headline in the Washington Post that said there was a dramatic turnaround, and it was the Soviets' number one foreign policy goal for the 1980s was to stop the deployment of the Pershings. Almost single-handedly, Vice-President Bush, in a whistle stop campaign of three weeks of Europe, turned it around.

There was a headline in the Washington Post: "George Did It." And the George didn't refer to Schultz.

On the domestic side, he was head of the Presidential Task Force on Regulatory Relief that Chris DeMuth was directly involved in as was I. It led ultimately to an Executive Order 12866 that President Clinton did that Mack may be familiar with that put the vice-president, by definition, in charge of the regulatory side of the Government. Now, that's a lot of power. President Bush, as vice-president, wielded this as well as being de factor NSC advisor in the first Reagan term.

So there's a lot of precedent for a vice-president playing a huge role, and so, I would say, to make the point, that this is not unusual. It is something that has evolved over the last three or four decades. I could go into a long set of reasons why it has happened, and I think it is a very healthy development. He is, after all, the other elected person in the executive branch.

But I think that you'll find that you still need someone to make the train run. Whoever makes the train run has a lot of power associated with it, and that's the chief of staff and the staff secretary, the Dick Darman, if you will, of the first Reagan term; the Jim Sicone of the Bush term. I can't remember who had that, Mack.

MR. MCLARTY: John Podesta started as our first staff secretary.

MR. GRAY: And he then became chief of staff. Those are the two key jobs, and they will have the power necessary to make the White House run on time, I'm convinced.

MR. FELZENBERG: I'd like to add one thing. I think in the case of Cheney and Bush's style, you've got the office, the president's style, and the personality of Cheney just all coming together at once and forming those three legs of the stool.

Back in Woodrow Wilson's time, there was a guy named Thomas Riley Marshall, one of my favorite vice-presidents. He had two great quotes for the English language. One was a woman had two sons. One went off to sea, and the other became vice-president. Neither one have been heard of again.

[Laughter.]

MR. FELZENBERG: Now, we've come a long way from then, particularly if you remember that that was an administration that had a year and a half of presidential illness; we're not sure whether Wilson's wife was running the country. Marshall, no role at all in the whole Versailles matter and the treaty.

That won't happen now. I mean, you're going to have a divided Senate. You're going to have a vice-president getting very, very involved in the legislative process. I'm told there's an office on both the House side and the Senate side. A former House member can go on the floor. This is very unique for a vice-president, but he will be able to. Vice-president Bush could do that also. And, Boyden, people tell me he was known to use the House gym in many years as vice-president, and that was a way he did some lobbying. He would see some old colleagues and friends and things that many vice-presidents don't do.

Beginning with Nixon, the office has changed, and we can argue a lot about how much he advised Eisenhower on this or that, but the coming of the jet age meant presidents could send them abroad, and the coming of television; television made Nixon, with the Checkers speech. You can say it unmade him with the debates and some other things.

But the vice-president becomes--

[End of tape 1, side A.]

MR. FELZENBERG: --has to do more. When Eisenhower had surgery, they had a series of letters that actually became the basis of what you can see in the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, the passing of the baton going on to the Mondale experience, where Mondale--and you can speak better than I, but people who know him tell me that he was part of everything that Carter did, the first one with a West Wing office.

Actually, for the first time, we're beginning to talk about a Carter-Mondale administration. The idea of a Truman-Barkley administration would have been absolutely unthinkable. Nobody talked about it. You would see the vice-president's name on the campaign ads. That was about it.

But beginning with Carter, you get this Carter-Mondale, Reagan-Bush, now the Bush-Cheney approach. We heard a lot from Bill Clinton and Al Gore and how engaged Al Gore was in certain things. He had certain portfolios from the last administration. Cheney is building on that. But I think you also have that legislative process, which I don't think any vice-president has been engaged in very actively before.

Nelson Rockefeller antagonized a lot of people when he called a couple of rules issues early on in a way that Jerry Ford might not have wanted, which might have been the end of that vice-presidency, but I can't think of another case. But it's been growing. It's evolving. It's a much-understudied office, and I think he's now almost an equal partner. But I think as every president and vice-president can tell you, what presidents giveth, they can also taketh away.

MR. MANN: Mack?

MR. MCLARTY: Three quick points. First of all, we're talking about a number of private sector and corporate terms here: chief operating officer and chief executive officer, and I think the New York Times Magazine had America, Inc. and cited President-elect Bush having an MBA.

I, as Norm generously noted, have had the privilege to serve as a chief executive officer of a New York Stock Exchange company, so my first point would be there's a lot of work in any administration, particularly in this complicated and increasingly interconnected world. So I think there's enough work responsibility, tough decisions to be made to have a number of senior executives, to use another private sector term, and that, I think, suggests a very strong vice-president, which, obviously, Al Gore was, as Clinton and Gore ran as a true team and had a true partnership, and obviously, Bush and Cheney will have a very strong partnership, differently nuanced and different people, but no question a strong vice-president.

Secondly, I would make the point, since we're talking about the private sector a bit, one distinct difference in the private sector--corporate America--and governance is that you have a true bottom line in the corporate sector. In government, it is a bit more qualitative, a bit more perception as opposed to real return on equity, EBITDA and price/earnings multiples. And I think that one thing we need to note on this panel, that while we are appropriately focusing on process and structure, and that is clearly important, I can tell you Jack Welch will say the real importance is the bottom line.

And I think that is something that in any administration, if you do not put a human face on what you're trying to do, as someone earlier noted, and if the American people particularly, whether it's Bill Clinton coming to office with only 43 percent, which some people have forgotten, or this very close election that was virtually a dead heat, when you don't have an overwhelming mandate coming in, the real essence is going to be whether people feel the policies not only are executed well from the White House and the administration but are policies that make a positive and meaningful difference in their lives.

And I think that's the real challenge for any administration, is to govern and manage not just in terms of process, as important as that is, but actual results: reducing a deficit or passing the North American Free Trade Agreement, building on the Bush administration; those types of initiatives, the Family and Medical Leave Act, which we heard over and over as the president would go out in the country. That is a very important aspect of any presidency.

MR. WATSON: May I just make one short point?

MR. MCLARTY: Of course.

MR. WATSON: It was an historic point that was referenced by Al just a moment ago, but I think it deserves a moment of emphasis. No vice-president in American history before Walter Mondale had an office in the West Wing. Walter Mondale was there, just steps away from the Oval Office. That's where he operated from. He and his staff were in the mix of everything.
He had a regularly-scheduled weekly--virtually inviolate, unless it was simply impossible to do--private luncheon with the president, President Carter, which no one else attended but the two of them.

I make that only as an historic reference, because since that time, every vice-president has had his office in the West Wing, and I think that in Dick Cheney's vice-presidency, we are likely to see an even more operational vice-president than we've ever seen before.

MR. ORNSTEIN: You know, it's probably interesting to note that the choice of Cheney probably reflected, for Bush, almost a transition point. He was thinking ahead to governing more than he was to his electoral coalition when he picked him, which was interesting as well.
We might note that the first, I think, reference to Cheney as prime minister was in the Economist.

[Laughter.]

MR. ORNSTEIN: Which I thought was a conspiracy by the English to bring back King George.

[Laughter.]

BRITISH VOICE: We never got over it.

[Laughter.]

MR. ORNSTEIN: Her Majesty says the 49 other states can come, but we can keep Florida.

[Laughter.]

MR. ORNSTEIN: We may want to come back to the role of Cheney as chief operating officer, given that he may be very much pinned down in the Senate and may make some of those roles difficult, but let's turn for a moment to the notion of Bush's vision of governing and decision making in foreign policy, which is clearly a very different one from that of President Clinton and of some of his Republican predecessors, and it became more evident when he went about the choice, during his transition, of picking both a Secretary of State and a Secretary of Defense.
He started with someone with an extraordinarily strong personality and individual following in Colin Powell as Secretary of State and then took some time, and that was a given, almost announced before the election, that if he got elected, Powell would be there. But then, he took a substantial amount of time picking a Secretary of Defense and very clearly considered and then rejected Dan Coats, former Senator from Indiana; extremely popular with his colleagues; strong endorsement from the Senate majority leader, Trent Lott; the former majority leader, now his law partner, Bob Dole, and a whole host of others.

They did a lengthy interview, and it appears, including from comments made privately by the people around Bush, that while he liked Coats, and Coats thought the interview had gone extremely well, he was afraid that Coats wouldn't have that strong personality to stand up to the Secretary of State; would become more of a subordinate figure and was afraid that Coats didn't have a management ability to manage an organization with a $300 billion budget and 3 million people involved.

Instead, he went for Don Rumsfeld, whose strength of personality goes unchallenged and obviously has some management experience as well. Now, the vision here appears to be having extremely strong-willed Secretaries of State and Defense; having the prominent role in making, shaping and implementing foreign policy with a subordinate role for the national security advisor, one that returns to a more traditional model of perhaps General Scowcroft of being one more of coordinating among different, larger, competing power centers.

Is that how you see it? Do you think he's thought this through? And can it work?

MR. FELZENBERG: Can I make one thought about it? As all the names started coming out, when that national security team was in place, I stood back for a minute and said my God, how well they can each do each other's jobs when you think about it. I mean, Rumsfeld also comes out of the Congress. He had been a chief of staff. Cheney had been at Defense. Rumsfeld is going back to Defense, where he had been.

I could see either of them serving as Secretary of State. Colin Powell could easily serve as Secretary of Defense. He has been national security advisor. He has been head of the Joint Chiefs. So when they begin to argue with one another about policy, they're also able to see the perspective of the other department or of the other fellow, which makes this a very, very strong team. I emphasize the word "team," because I think to some extent, they were looking at puzzle, the whole puzzle, as well as all the pieces, not just how the piece fits into place but how it works with the other pieces, and I think that's a very, very strong aspect of this team.

Regarding Condi, I think it's absolutely true that she will be an honest broker, as Mr. Scowcroft was. There won't be a Mack Bundy running the State Department in the basement, and there won't be a Henry Kissinger having the basement swallow a hormone pill and reproduce the State Department in the basement.

[Laughter.]

MR. FELZENBERG: I urge you to read some of the stories about Bill Rogers and some of the frustrations he had in that department. That won't happen here. They will disagree, but they will disagree from a perspective of respect and of, before they come to the meeting, how would I have handled it in the other fellow's chair. I think that's a very strong thing to have.

MR. MCLARTY: I would make one additional point. I adopt everything Al has just said. I think he's right on the money about the rather extraordinary and cross-cutting, interlocking experience criteria that these men fill, from the legislative branch, from the executive branch, former White House chief of staff, former NSC advisor, et cetera. I think all of that is right on the money.
There's one other interesting point. In his Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense, President-elect Bush has picked two men who themselves were talked about as Presidential candidates at one time or another. The younger folks in the audience may not recall that about Don Rumsfeld, but it is true.

[Laughter.]

MR. MCLARTY: He is a man who considered running for president; obviously did not do so but thought about it, and everyone knows the more recent history of General Powell.

So I think it is, in my opinion, a tribute to President-elect Bush to choose two such strong and experienced people to head those two very important departments, and I think that his selection of Ms. Rice as his national security advisor does exactly as Al and Norm are suggesting: it is a subordinate honest broker role, not a competing role.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Let me be devil's advocate here for a minute and throw out a different thesis to you or combination of theses. First is you've got extremely strong-willed people who may be able to see the other person's perspective, but if you have a very strong viewpoint about what the United States ought to do or ought not to do, and it clashes with that of another equally strong-willed person, you may not get a backing down just because you can see it from another perspective.

So this has the potential for significant conflict, and how that conflict gets resolved, what role the president plays in all of this, who clearly has, of course, much less experience in all of these areas than all of the people around him is an interesting one. But there's another element of this, too: Colin Powell arguably is the most liberal, in terms of his broader philosophy, member of the Bush administration.

He may very well gather around him, because he seems to have been given a good deal of leeway to pick his own subordinates, a group of others whom the conservative wing of the Republican Party will see as if not anathema at least suspicious to him. In the meantime, we seem to be getting in the Defense Department a collection of people who are very much comfortable to the bedrock conservative wing of the party, and we may see emerging out of this a sense, just as we saw in the Reagan administration when conservatives didn't get what they wanted a feeling that there was a conspiracy from inside against them, this sense of pitting the State Department, traditionally viewed with suspicion by the right, and the Defense Department against one another in a struggle for George Bush's soul.

How about that as a thesis? Anybody want to take that on?

MR. FELZENBERG: Well, I'll take it on. Yes, Powell is a strong person, and he's known as being what he called once a Rockefeller Republican. I would remind those of you my age or maybe older who remember those days, Rockefeller Republican meant big spending domestically; it meant soft on the social issues, like abortion, but it also--he was quite a hawk. When he died, Barry Goldwater said his problem with Vietnam wasn't with me.

I mean, we agreed on that. It was on the other things he was doing in New York we had fights about. So if I were Saddam Hussein right now, I would not be very happy to see Dick Cheney back in power anywhere; I would be worried; to see Colin Powell back in power anywhere; I'd be worried. Donald Rumsfeld, with his strong views, I'd be very worried.

I think by Easter, we might see those UN inspectors back or maybe certainly by July 4. I think Powell's problems with some other Republicans or differences of opinion with other Republicans are, as we've heard many, many times, not what the Secretary of State does. I also think the Secretary of State is the chief diplomat, and the Defense Department always gets ready for what happens when diplomacy fails.

We've had strong-willed people before; I remember in the Reagan administration, we used to read about how Weinberger and Schultz were at each other's throats all the time, but they stood together when it came to Iran-Contra. And it's too bad they weren't listened to, to some degree, at least the record tells us.

So I'm not worried about that. I'll defer to the others on the panel.

MR. MCLARTY: Norm, let me address the point about strong personalities of people and people of real standing. As Jack noted, two of the members of the cabinet having been potential Presidential candidates; we had a somewhat similar, not identical, but somewhat similar situation not in our foreign policy team but in our economic team with Lloyd Bentsen, a very distinguished chairman of the Senate Finance Committee; a very strong vice-presidential candidate, candidate for president; Bob Rubin, almost a legend on Wall Street and the international financial markets; Leon Panetta, who had been chairman of the Budget Committee; Ron Brown, who had had a very, very high profile, very strong reputation in the political arena.

In the economic side, I think those strong personalities, we were able to work through rather quickly developing the economic plan with very strongly differing points of views, including the vice-president, about how to approach the most important issue, certainly, of the 1992 campaign. So I think those can be reconciled.

I think it also, though, raises another point when you talk about national security issues and foreign policy, and that is that international economics have clearly become a fundamental pillar of foreign policy, and the NEC, the National Economic Council, when we're talking about structure, which was debated quite a bit coming into the Clinton presidency, I think worked quite well under Bob Rubin and had continued to do so under Gene Sperling.

So I think it's going to be interesting to see how the Bush-Cheney administration handles the international economics issue in terms of traditional foreign policy, because it clearly comes into play, including our embassies, where the ambassadors, I think, have become much more engaged in traditional economic issues and advocacy than in prior years.

MR. MANN: Mack, that's a very important point. I think a signature contribution of the Clinton years was to elevate the importance of international economic policy making and to work to integrate it into the broad national security framework.

One gets some hints of, in the planning for the new administration, about a somewhat different set of priorities. We had a debate over whether the special trade rep should have cabinet status. We had a debate as to whether the NEC should exist. We now, apparently, have an innovation in the White House structure with a separate staff for international economic matters reporting jointly to Condi Rice and Larry Lindsey.

Does the Bush administration coming in believe the Clinton administration did something badly in the international economic arena that argues for some changes in structure and changes in priority? Boyden, do you have a sense of that?

MR. GRAY: I don't think so. I think this is just internal organization. I don't think it has any larger meaning to it. The talk about making Evans, putting more power in Commerce and the trade rep I think had to do with the fact that there wasn't a trade rep named at the time, and Evans is, you know, the president's closest friend, probably the next closest friend.

I think once they realized that that has huge meaning abroad, which department has the upper hand in terms of free trade, I think they quickly retreated, and the choice of Zoellick makes pretty clear: he's a very aggressive internationalist when it comes to economics. I think that's a pretty strong signal that they're going to continue what the Clinton people started. I don't see any retreat on that.

Also, an interesting piece, op ed piece, I think, by Friedman this morning: is Powell going to be America on duty or America Online? He comes from board membership at AOL, and I think he's going to have very much on his mind the commercial web that we've been weaving now from NAFTA all the way through, and I think that's going to continue. I see no reason why globalization is going to stop.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Let's turn the focus for a minute back to Congress and the President-elect's relationship with Congress. Let me mention one other analogy here. The last time Republicans had control of all of the levers of power was 1953-54. The numbers in Congress were close to identical. The House, the Republican advantage was just one or two different from what it is now. In the Senate, there were really 48 Republicans, 47 Democrats and Wayne Morse, who had been a Republican, came to the Senate floor when it organized with a folding chair and placed it between the two aisles on his journey from Republican to independent and then, two years later, to being a Democrat; got voted to organize with the Republicans.

Eisenhower, of course, came in with a huge election margin, a very different public image and some sense of momentum but immediately got into trouble with Congress, with the Republicans in Congress. It came in part because he didn't consult with the Republican leaders over his cabinet, and he picked a labor person, the head of the Plumbers Union, for Secretary of Labor, which infuriated, among others, the majority leader in the Senate, Robert Taft; remember Taft-Hartley; and found that because the Republicans in the House wanted deep tax cuts, deeper than he wanted; deeper spending cuts than he wanted; and also larger tariffs, that the speaker, Joe Martin, had real trouble keeping the troops together.

The President turned repeatedly to the Democratic leaders, Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson, to help him out. What do you see in this analogy? Is there a DeLay analogy to the trouble that Eisenhower had with his own Republicans in the House? Will the difficulties in the relationships that President Eisenhower had with first Majority Leader Bob Taft and then his replacement, Bill Noland, reiterate themselves in the relationship with the Republicans here? And is the choice of Ashcroft, in part, a very conscious attempt to make sure that he doesn't have those difficulties with divided Republicans at the beginning of his administration?

MR. FELZENBERG: Funny you should ask. I wrote my senior thesis, back in the dark ages, on the Eisenhower relationship with Congress.

A couple of things: the joke about that cabinet--we heard a lot about Democrats in cabinets; it was nine millionaires and a plumber, and Mr. Dirkin, the Labor Secretary, was the plumber. He also had his own falling out with Eisenhower and was gone before the re-election.

Let me put it out: that was a time where Ike had defeated Bob Taft, who had actually wanted to be president. That would have been the last time a son of a president became president. But he was also known as Mr. Republican. He could have also been called Mr. Conservative. The fight between Eisenhower and Taft was one about isolationism, repealing Yalta, and that was the big fight that he had first off with the Senate. The first thing they wanted to do was restrict the president's treaty-making authority. That's still in the news again, Mr. Clinton could probably tell us if he were on the panel.

There was not a single member of Congress, at least in the House, who had served with a Republican president. They had spent 20 years of being againners; had seen Franklin Roosevelt whip them every time. They would have understood something about government shutdowns if they could have seen in the future.

But the differences, I think, are very great. In this case, George Bush ran as a conservative. He was the conservatives' choice. I mean, all the conservative groups rallied around him very, very early. He made it very clear that he was picking up the mantle of Reagan, and he was going to be that kind of a president, not just a conservative one but one with a broad brush who, as Reagan used to talk about, bright colors and not pastels.

That was the kind of campaign he was running, particularly when he got in trouble with McCain. It was the conservatives that got him through some of the tougher primaries at the end after the original stumble in New Hampshire.

I think he's picked Ashcroft because he believes--this is my take on what he believes, so he believes he'd be the strongest attorney general; that he was an attorney general of a state; had a good record in prosecuting crime; that he was a governor who appointed people and managed things, even things he disagreed with. You know, we heard a lot about the Ashcroft religion. It bans smoking, which is politically correct for most of us. It bans drinking, which is politically correct for most of us. It also forbids gambling, okay? But he ran a very effective lottery commission. He showed he had the ability to carry things out. He didn't say let the thing atrophy because I don't believe in gambling. He didn't go around taking ads telling people don't buy lottery tickets.

I mean, there are certain things that people carry out. He's going to be a strong attorney general, and I think that's why he wanted him. I think there's also a perception--and I must say this; this is what I think they think--a perception that the Justice Department has been somewhat compromised if not politicized or at the very least not as effective as it could have been.
And I think he wanted a strong manager. The man had been governor for 8 years and an AG for 8 years.

Now, Norm, you're absolutely right: what did happen was there were some problems between Eisenhower and the Congress, and when it came to that Bricker amendment, the President pretty much asked Johnson to save him, and that's what went into the 1954 election; in fact, that's the only time I know where the out party said we can do more for the president than his party can. And that was one of the reasons the 1954 election went south for the Republicans.
I don't see it happening this time.

Regarding DeLay, I think some of the president's detractors need a new Gingrich, and they've been missing him, and they've been trying to invent one, and DeLay is as close as they could come. But I think at the end, Bush will be the party leader on probably both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Anybody else?

Jack?

MR. WATSON: I suspect--I know nothing about this, but I suspect that one of the major reasons that President-elect Bush picked Senator Ashcroft as a nominee was because he would be so acceptable to the conservative wing of the party. The other factors, certainly, are there; are possibly motivations on his part for the selections. But in my judgment, that's the overriding reason he went with Ashcroft, A.

B, we've got 50 Republican Senators and 50 Democratic Senators. That's really not quite like it's ever been before. It's one thing for us to say, as Boyden correctly did, that there's no question about who won here: George W. Bush won the presidency. He's the president. So that's not the question. The question is how effective is he going to be with his legislative agenda in the Congress? That's the question.

And in my judgment, in order to be effective with his legislative agenda in the Congress, he is going to have to do it in a compromising and conciliatory way, in an effective, politicking way. He cannot act, in my opinion, as though he has a national mandate for his agenda. He cannot do that with impunity. Because he doesn't have a national mandate for his agenda. And therefore, I believe--I take him at his word. I take the President-elect at his word. He wants to reach across the aisle. He wants to put together a bipartisan coalition of a legislative package that is doable. He does not want stalemate.

And if he is to be taken at his word on those matters, then we must expect and predict that he will be dealing and compromising and so forth.

One other final point on this, Norm. Because I want him to succeed as president, I sincerely hope that he will say something in his inaugural address about the extraordinary closeness of this election. I hope that he will not ignore that in his inaugural address. I devoutly hope that he will acknowledge it; that he will acknowledge the fact that this was, in effect, a dead heat and that in order for him to govern effectively as President of the United States, it will be necessary for him to have a Democratic and Republican coalition of support and reach out to all those people in the country who didn't vote for him in that way.

I hope he'll do that.

MR. MANN: Jack, if I may follow up on that and reframe Norm's question a little bit, I think what you just said is exceedingly important. If we were to distill the wisdom such as it exists from political scientists following an election, I think it would be to the new President-elect, read or define your mandate very carefully. Don't pretend it's synonymous with what you ran on, but it is the sum total of all of the messages coming from the election results for the presidency, for the Congress; from what we can tell about the preferences of citizens.

Secondly, develop a plausible coalitional strategy. Is this a time to reenact a conservative coalition? Is it possible to take all of the Republicans and, if you will, low-lying Democrats issue by issue? Is that a plausible general strategy for governing? Political scientists would probably say it is with some individual issues, but it's not broadly likely to be successful; that Jack's idea of genuinely sort of center-out coalition may be more durable over the long haul.

The third is that politics, that is, politicking has less influence on policy than policy has on politics. And therefore, the crucial decisions you make at the beginning are substantive. It's what you try to accomplish. And that really takes us to the agenda. You're right: the focus was education, tax cuts, national missile defense and social insurance. I would guess of those four, the most amenable to cross-party coalition building is education, and I presume that will kick off very early.

But everyone now in the Congress knows that if Bush was after a $600 to $700 billion tax cut package, he could get something close to unanimity and be seen as wildly successful, but thus far, he's decided not to do that. So, query: why not? And what kind of sort of mandate definition and coalitional strategy does he have in mind?

MR. MCLARTY: President-elect Bush, I think, has made it very clear that he wants to try to pass legislation as much as possible in a bipartisan manner and to build a coalition, a center-out, a vital center coalition. He has repeatedly cited his experience in Texas of getting things done on a bipartisan basis, even having the lieutenant governor's widow there with him and the Speaker of the House in Texas, who is a Democrat, introduce him.

So he's made that very clear. I think he has also demonstrated a genuine commitment in his cabinet selection where he chose Norm Mineta in a very important position as Secretary of Transportation and clearly has reached out to other Democrats and may continue to do so with some of the undersecretary appointments and perhaps other major posts.

So I think that is a sign, Tom, that he is moving in that direction. How successful he'll be, I think you'll have a very experienced legislative team, which I think will be very helpful, and Nick Calio was very helpful to us on the passage of the NAFTA, which was a bipartisan effort, and I think that will serve him well. But obviously, there's going to be some sharp disagreements in terms of the actual policy itself, even in education; perhaps some very sharp disagreements even in education. And I think the economic issues, frankly, may not overwhelm; that's too strong, but may dominate these first 100 days, because I think we're back to "it is the economy, stupid," so to speak, where the average person is very concerned about economic issues. That's a change from probably 60 to 90 days ago.

MR. MANN: Boyden, would you address this?

MR. GRAY: There are a lot of issues floating around in your question, Tom, and so, I'll just try to sort them all out. I think the three things that he'll move with early on will be education, the tax cut and a prescription drug benefit.

The tax cut, why doesn't he compromise? Well, I don't think he should compromise before he actually gets it up there and they start haggling. You don't want to negotiate with yourself--or with Brookings--first.

[Laughter.]

MR. GRAY: I think you want to get it up there and then negotiate later.

On the education front, I'm a little disheartened to see that they're already trading away the voucher thing. I mean, I can understand why that might be an ultimate deal-breaker, but I think the debate about it is very, very important; very, very important. The black community is overwhelmingly in support of vouchers, and it's time to have the American public understand that; also understand that the black community wants to send their kids not across the river to some suburban school but to a local school if there is one, if it's better than the high school they're in now.

That's certainly the experience here in Washington, where we have a private scholarship system. They go to as local a school as they can find, and it's having dramatic success.

On prescription drug benefit, I don't think there's going to be a huge debate over the need for it. That was really resolved in the campaign. The architecture: is it going to be a Medicare extension or a private sector plan? I think that's what's going to be the debate. And I think that how much the economy can pay for is going to be also a very important issue. But these issues seem to me to be ones that can engage in bipartisan debate that's useful, constructive and will get something at the other end. I don't really have any doubt about that.

That may not be exactly what President-elect Bush wants, but it will be to advance the ball.
There's one other little thing that I can't resist, hearing all of this talk about Senator Ashcroft, who won't be the point person for any of these major initiatives. I think the fight over him is a dust-up, sort of a warmup for judgeship fights to come. That's what I think it's about. One of the ironies is that you talk about enforcing the law whether or not you agree with it. Elizabeth Drew said there is a compromise. There is a compromise on campaign finance reform dealing with paycheck protection.

You don't have to, she writes, demand that all union workers be given a choice of whether or not they want their money spent in ways they don't like. You can compromise by simply enforcing the Beck decision, which applied to nonunion workers in a closed union shop. And I just have to say that I'm amazed that it would be a compromise to a future legislative proposal simply to enforce existing law.

[Laughter.]

MR. FELZENBERG: I think to his everlasting credit, George Bush is going to confound the political scientists. I mean, he already did in the last election. We had all these models floating around. But I think you're going to see shifting coalitions on each of these issues that Boyden talked about. That's what I mean. I don't think you're going to see a group of--we used to call them boll weevils, and what are they now? Conservative Democrats? Blue dogs. Sometimes, they think we're dealing with zookeepers instead of House leaders with all the animal names.

But I think at the end of the campaign, even Al Gore was talking about accountability in education, about using that Federal money to improve standards, something Bush started, and Gore began moving his way. They still disagreed over vouchers and what do you do when you withhold the funds at the end, but he was even moving to accountability. I don't think the unions liked to see Gore doing that, but I think they understood why he was moving there.

I think there's a coalition on that. Joe Lieberman has written a lot of letters in the past about missile defense and military preparedness. We might see more of the old Joe Lieberman bringing some more of the centrist, what's left of what was the Henry Jackson wing of the Democratic Party coming back, how few of them there were.

We heard a lot of praise for Senator Breaux in the last election by Mr. Bush for his stand on Social Security partial privatization. I don't think necessarily you're going to see some of the same Democrats voting on some of these same proposals. You might see a couple of Republicans dropping off and other Democrats getting on. But I think as he moves down the list, you're going to see a very effective legislative agenda, and he will be driving the agenda.

There will be compromise along the way. There will be certain things that he doesn't want, but taking a leaf from the Bible of Reagan, if you can get 80 percent of what you ask for, you're doing pretty well, and you come back with the other 20 later. I think he'll be that kind of a president, and I think we're going to see only the political scientists upset, because it's going to be very hard to quantify and make a model out of this.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Let me ask one last question, and then, we'll open things up to the audience. I want to come back to where we started with the initial statement that Jack made and also Boyden seconded, and that is to talk a bit about the subcabinet, the people below the top levels. We are just getting at least the first two suggested out there now with names floated, probably soon to be confirmed for deputy Secretaries of Treasury and Defense.

But we know hundreds, indeed thousands of others yet to come. We know that it took an average of nine months for both the previous Bush administration and the Clinton administration to get their Senate-confirmable appointees in place, meaning a significant portion of the presidency gone before you actually had your team in there to implement policy. This time, given the 36-day delay and the continuing hurdles in getting people in place; the requirement that was mentioned before of full FBI field investigations for all the Senate-confirmable people, we're probably talking about a year or more, a quarter of the presidency gone before you have these key people in place.

Talk a little bit about, those of you who were involved in the center of this, about the implications of that for Bush's ability to govern and whether there's anything he can do, given where we are now, to expedite that process.

Let me start with Boyden.

MR. GRAY: Hope you won't mind if I leave after I talk, because I've got to go.

This is a real problem, and it's compounded by a statute that the Republicans passed in 1998 to amend the Vacancies Act, which says that no person who has been the nominated may act as acting in the post that he or she is nominated for until he or she has been confirmed. Now, the practice had always been to hold back on doing anything until you got confirmed, because you didn't want to sort of be presumptuous, A, and B, you didn't want to sort of harm your chances, which is the same point about being presumptuous.

But it does make translating policy into action very much more difficult. I think the only way to get a true deregulation of this entire appointments process through is to make it prospective, so that it is not thought to apply to the current fights that are underway. And so that's unfortunate, too, but if I were in a position to decide this, I would bite the bullet; say all right, here's a package of things that won't benefit me this time around but will if I get reelected or whoever gets elected in 2004 and go ahead and try to push it through, even if it means it's not retroactive or not applicable currently.

We've got to cut the Gordian knot on this at some point, and I think it will become apparent, the difficulties that people have will become apparent, and they will only expedite the passage of much-needed reform. There are a lot of ideas; what needs to happen is to pull them together, put them in legislative form and get it done. I believe this is an absolute priority. I can't think of anything more important for the culture to get done.

It's hard to ask President Bush to be selfish about it and say I want this to apply to my own appointees that are now in the process, but hopefully, the Congress will, in a bipartisan fashion, wake up to say this has got to happen.

MR. MCLARTY: In a spirit of bipartisanship, I would strongly second Boyden Gray's motion. It's just crucial, and I almost got dismayed and depressed, Norm, as you talked about our waiting nine months to get a government in place. We've talked about the private sector. No competent board of directors or CEO would wait nine months to get his or her management team in place. I think Boyden's got it absolutely right, and I think he's probably got the right way to do it in terms of doing it prospectively.

MR. : I can't second that enough. One, again, quick story, and then, we'll hopefully hear from the audience. Jack and I were discussing it earlier. We came up with some proposals in 1990; there have been three commissions since us. We all know what needs to be done, but there needs to be a will on the part of both the executive side and particularly the Congress to get moving with this.

I think, number one, if anyone here was called today and offered a position by the president, you'd have to fill out this White House form which has that famous question: list anything you or your spouse or anyone you ever met has ever done that might embarrass you or the President of the United States. I mean, think hard.

That's the fortieth question. We named each question after a past scandal. We had the Tom Eagleton question; the mental health question. We had the Bert Lance question, the business dealings question. We had the Judge Ginsburg question about--so what do they do? These things get like an accordion. They add more. There is now a question about nannies. I don't think they use the word nannies, but do you hire domestics, and are they foreign nationals and--okay.

Then, you have the FBI form, which means that they can go and interview all of your neighbors and anyone you ever lent a lawnmower to. And then, you have the OGE form, which is a financial disclosure form. That one, almost every question is required by law. They're going to have to deal with this. And if you go on a regulatory board, and you're forced to sell an asset, then, you have to take a capital gain. And, of course, we've had a very good market, as I'm sure Mack would take the opportunity to remind us all.

[Laughter.]

MR. : Well, that means you take the hit. When? Well, we don't expect people to get rich off going into government, but we're now talking about your children's tuition and all sorts of other things coming down the road.

MR. : That problem has become a lot less in the last 6 months.

[Laughter.]

MR. GRAY: One thing that--I'm not sure I heard you right, but there is a law that was passed early in the Clinton administration that gives you a capital gains rollover if it's necessary to avoid a conflict, and that's the only good thing that I can see now about serving in government is that if you do, if you're a high-tech, you know, dot-com tycoon, and you still have an appreciated stock after this, you can launder your capital gains for the period of your service.

So there is a good reason to be in government if you still have any gains.

MR. MCLARTY: I'm even more dismayed now. I was not an Internet tycoon.

MR. : Well, you're barely out of the White House now with that package of forms.

If anything you're going to be doing requires national security, you've got a whole bunch of other things going on that we won't get into. Then, welcome to the Congress: a whole set of other forms that have nothing to do with anything I just told you.

Now, is anyone a fan of Lucille Ball in this audience? Remember the one where Lucy and Ethel are in the chocolate factory, and the conveyor belt speeds up, and there's chocolate all over the room? That's what this process has become, and Boyden finally is right to do it legislatively, because the FBI doesn't make a decision who to do a four-way. I mean, they try to treat everybody fairly. Everybody gets the same treatment. We're going to have over 6,000 people, perhaps, going through this.

If they want to do this, they have to simply take the responsibility and say this is required, and this isn't?

Why don't I stop with that?

MR. WATSON: May I just make one quick point--

MR. MANN: Sure, go ahead, Jack.

MR. WATSON: --before we turn to the audience about this? I think that President Bush should send, perhaps even including himself, the highest level delegation to selected leaders in the Congress, both Democratic and Republican, to talk about how now, not for a future president, but now, we can get this done better, more sensibly, faster and responsibly without losing or abating any of the Congress' right to advise and consent on appointments; to confirm appointments. It can be done in a fair way, far exceeding the way it's being conducted now.
The only chance that I think the president has to avoid a lot of this nonsense that is so damaging not only to his presidency but to the country is to go up there and talk about it right now or now.
One other point just informational: there have been estimates that the average cost of senior-level appointees to the government incur in their accountants and legal fees and et cetera run in the range of $40,000--$40,000 out of your pocket to accept a post of public service. That's not fair.

MR. : Norm, just a factual point: if you or others could answer it, for those departments without cabinet members confirmed on inauguration day, the--

[End of tape 1, side B.]

MR. : I don't know how to use a microphone.

[Laughter.]

MR. : On the point that was made that because several of the people in this new White House have had other jobs there, that it might facilitate their interacting because they understand the problems of the other person, it seems to me that might work in reverse.

To provide an example, for example, here is Colin Powell, who famously, when he was in the military, did not want to risk American troops. It's become kind of a joke in our government that a Secretary of State is all for using troops; the Secretary of Defense says why not try diplomacy? Is it not also possible that because these people know each other's jobs so well that it will simply facilitate their disputes as a possibility?

MR. : Quick response, Dan: in Don Rumsfeld and Colin Powell and Bob Zoellick and I'm sure others to be named, we have certainly in those I've just mentioned very strong personalities, strong personalities with long established convictions and beliefs about which conduct, which path, which approach is to be preferred over another, so that the risk that a president takes when he appoints such people to high positions in his administration is that he's going to have conflict.

They are not people who are going to give their ground easily, no matter how much they understand the other person's point of view. In that situation, obviously, as was noted earlier, it ultimately falls to the president and/or the vice-president to resolve those conflicts and to do so in a decisive, clear, leadership way. So I didn't mean to suggest by my comments earlier that this is going to be smooth sailing. I don't think it's going to be smooth sailing.

MR. FELZENBERG: I'd agree with that. I don't think we're moving the groove thing because they see each other's perspective, and, of course, we do pay our presidents to resolve conflict. And he's had the confidence to appoint a strong team. Now, we'll have to see not only how he resolves it but how it's implemented, and that's where the question of how those second and third level people get into their jobs is extremely important.

MS. LEFTWICH: My name is Gail Leftwich. I'm with the Federation of State Humanities Councils. I'm just a normal person, basically.

[Laughter.]

MS. LEFTWICH: I was sitting and thinking throughout this--

MR. : You know, I don't like the implication of that.

[Laughter.]

MS. LEFTWICH: Well, I'm just saying that my association doesn't have some major other significance associated with my comments.

[Laughter.]

MS. LEFTWICH: I was thinking about both sort of the small implications and large implications of the ways in which--and I guess I wonder whether you guys think what I'm going to say is correct--the ways in which, the context in which all of this is happening, transitions and the kinds of analysis that you're talking about, has fundamentally changed. The question is whether it is fundamental.

Both the role of the media and the--call it intrusiveness, but the ways in which media, Internet and conventional, is able to access information and run information 24 hours a day, 7--you know, 24-7-365, to use that buzz thing, which means that nothing is truly private or in some ways deliberative in a meaningful way. Two is the ways in which even politicians go in and out on this sort of I'm just like an average person; come and be a part of my life. That works for both the president as well as for other senior figures.

You know, political figures want to use that sense of familiarity. President Clinton was very good at this--that familiarity, invite me into your room; I'm just like you. It invites a certain kind of intrusiveness in people's lives, but then, of course, it wants to be flipped when someone wants to get things done that requires a certain amount of secrecy or some sort of subtleness.

And then, third, and then, I'll end, has implications for how Congress reads all of this as well. Congress also, now, it would seem recently, has gathered a certain sense of independent power and significance and an absence of deference or at least a diminishment of the deference that historically had been offered to a new president, because they, too, have created their own independent power basis, which is a combination of using the media as well as using this familiarity and direct connection with the American people that then gives them a power in their relationships with the president.

So my fundamental question is has that changed the entire context in which this analysis is being carried out?

MR. : Of course.

[Laughter.]

MR. : Of course, it has. One of the best books that I've read recently, I want to put in a plug here, although I have no financial interest whatsoever, is a book recently out by Richard North Patterson called "Protect and Defend." It's a novel, purely fictional, but it examines the appointment process. In the case of the novel, Gail, it's the appointment of a brand new president's, just-inaugurated new president's appointment of a woman to be chief justice of the United States Supreme Court.

And that book, that novel, is an examination of the media's role and the Senate's role and special interest groups' roles as well as all of the political roles that you would expect to be played on the Presidential and Senatorial level that underlie and interact with and affect confirmation of Presidential senior appointees.

So my answer to your question is of course, it has changed things.

MR. : But these are now the rules of the game, and everyone knows the rules are in effect: that the permanent campaign is a permanent feature of our politics which really leads you back to the question Norm asked: it didn't take rocket science to anticipate the controversy surrounding the three nominees, and one assumes they were made with eyes wide open to what would unfold in the days and weeks ahead.

Only in the future will we be able to look back with hindsight and judge whether that decision made sense or not.

MR. COLDGE: Thank you; Abrahat Coldge.

If people were to perceive President-elect Bush as chief executive officer, Cheney as chief operating officer, whom would they have to see as the board of directors in that setup?

[Laughter.]

MR. : I want to second what Mack said about the private sector. You know, very often, you hear cabinet members say we're going to run this like a business, except there's no bottom line, and you can't measure them that way. And there are no businesses that have all of its competitors sitting on its board of directors.

But that's what our founding fathers gave us, where you have the Congress part of this process. They don't appoint, but they have to confirm. I mean, this isn't something Michael Eisner has to deal with at the Disney Corporation or Mr. Welch had to deal with at GE.

So I would also not push that CEO and chief operating officer analogy too far. I think that there will be areas where they complement each other very well.

One point I haven't mentioned: often, when governors come in, and some of our most successful presidents have been governors, they eventually wind up going to somebody who's worked his way around Washington before, and we can argue who's going to play that role to some degree: maybe Cheney, maybe Card, maybe somebody else. But they also bring the tremendous ability to bargain, to make decisions, to appoint people, putting their oar in here, putting their oar in there, as Carol Channing sings in Hello, Dolly.

That's the best description of a governor or an executive I've seen. So we're going to see the meshing out.

MR. : One other point to remember: at least theoretically, a board of directors of a publicly-held corporation is elected by the shareholders.

[Laughter.]

MR. MCLARTY: The shareholders, it's pretty clear who that is.

MR. : And that's not the case with the president's cabinet. There's a wonderful story which I can't tell very well--

[Laughter.]

MR. : --about President Lincoln. He was--I don't recall the particular issue that was before him, but he had called his cabinet together, which was then numbered in six or seven people, and all of the cabinet was arrayed against him. They were voting no on the issue. And after President Lincoln heard all of them speak, he said, well, I can see from the discussion that there are six no votes, and I vote aye. The ayes have it.

[Laughter.]

MR. MCLARTY: Well, the only point to reinforce that there probably is not a comparison to board of directors; the shareholders are clearly the American people, and they will vote their stock in each election.

[Laughter.]

MR. LLOYD: Raymond Lloyd from the Parishee Democrat in Westminster.
On the closeness of the election, while the President-elect may have been a half a million behind in the popular vote, I think this hardly compares with the several million votes accruing to Vice-President Gore thanks to his public position as vice-president for 8 years. None of the panel mentioned electoral reform as a task for the new administration, but I wonder whether any consideration has been given in the U.S. to a handicap on incumbency; that is, incumbent candidates should have a plurality plus some to be re-elected, a rule which applied, for example, to Conservative Party leaders in Britain.

[Laughter.]

MR. : I think Democrats might vote for that now.

[Laughter.]

MR. : But I doubt it would be bipartisan.

[Laughter.]

MR. : As long as it didn't apply to the Congress.

[Laughter.]

MR. : That's it.

MR.WATSON: You know, I think, and this perhaps sounds a little facetious, but I don't mean it facetiously at all. I don't think we need Electoral College reform nearly as much as we need to modernize our voting machines. I think that it is--it borders on scandalous, certainly outrageous, that this country at this point in time, given all of our technological capabilities to do things clearly, are still operating with a lot of voting machines that leave all of the questions in place that we had in this election.

So I would hope that one of the consequences of what happened here in the Presidential election of 2000 is that states across the United States will examine their voting machines, their voting process and the voting machines that are used to record the votes and bring them into the Twenty-First Century in a way that works clearly and plainly.

MR. FELZENBERG: I can't second that enough. I have to say I did have a job like Katherine Harris' once, and we could never get any money for the Division of Elections. State legislatures take the view that the sun will come up tomorrow; the election will take place, and, you know, we don't have a problem like this every 100 years or so and leave it alone.

But I do think we ought to start dealing with this. As far as Congress' role, they do have the power in the Constitution to dictate the way that the ballot will be for Federal offices. They can't deal with state offices, but if they're going to say it's going to be a butterfly or a non-butterfly, or it's going to be listed vertically or horizontally, they have every right to do that for their own positions.

MR. MANN: It turns out that there's a great incumbency advantage for a president who runs for re-election to a second term, but alas, after that, it turns into a deficit. It turns into a time for a change sentiment rather than an incumbency advantage.

MR. LLOYD: That would be the third term.

MR. MANN: Starting with a third term.

MR. LLOYD: Start with four.

MR. MANN: Actually not. The evidence suggests it ticks in right away.

MR. ORNSTEIN: As my cab driver, Al Gore, suggested--

[Laughter.]

MR. ORNSTEIN: --we'll take one last question.

MR. MCLARTY: Just a quick reinforcing of what Jack and Al said: there were two other points that I think the election showed, not only on the elective process, but I hope it will energize people that my vote is truly important. When you think about in Florida, with 6 million votes cast, seeing 200 votes, that looks like a county judge's race, not the Presidential race. And secondly, it probably suggests that exit polls should be carefully reviewed before they're announced.

MR. : I.e., abolished.

MR. LUFSGAMBISI: Yana Lufsgambisi of Slovakia.

I have just a selfish question regarding the number three and four positions in the government, that if we move to, you know, number of positions to be filled, we might get into a backlog. Is there some kind of a procedure which appoints assistant Secretaries of State for State or Defense or other agencies, or it's basically as they come, first come, first served?

Thank you.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Well, the answer to that is a president can give priority and usually does to top national security positions.

MR. : Right.

MR. ORNSTEIN: In this case, it hasn't exactly happened. At least so far, some of those important positions: CIA director and the deputies have not been picked or announced at this stage, but once it goes to the Congress, it's in whatever order they want to take it up, and it obviously becomes very much related to the nature of the committee chairs and the committees themselves.

So right now, it doesn't look as if many of those positions will be in place very soon, certainly not when the new administration takes office on January 20.

With that, let me thank our panel of extraordinarily talented and experienced people.

[Applause.]

MR. ORNSTEIN: I'd like to thank Paula Ramer and Christian Cook, Paula who did an awful lot to pull this event together and Christian who helped out and is in the back as well; John Fortier again; Melissa Knauer. For all of our institutions, the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Heritage Foundation, for the three of us, we thank you very much. We hope we'll see you on the 25th when we further this cause, and we'll be back at this subject again, I'm sure.

Thank you.

[Applause.]

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