Transition Planning and People
C. Boyden Gray: I think the [Bush transition team] has done remarkably well given the time constraints. The one caveat to that is that . . . 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.
Norman J. Ornstein: What we've seen 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.
Role of Vice President Dick Cheney
Jack H. Watson, Jr.: One of the most interesting things to watch here . . . is the emerging role of Dick Cheney as vice president. . . . 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 . . . could be a uniquely powerful role in American history for this vice president.
Foreign Policy Team
Alvin Felzenberg: When the [Bush foreign policy team] begins 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.
Thomas F. "Mack" McLarty III: I adopt everything Al [Felzenberg] has just said. I think he*s right on the money about the rather extraordinary and crosscutting, interlocking experience criteria that these men fill, from the legislative branch, from the executive branch, former White House chief of staff, former NSC adviser, et cetera. Mandate and Agenda Watson: In my judgment, in order to be effective with his legislative agenda in Congress, [Bush] is going to have to do it in a com-promising and conciliatory way, in an effective, politicking way. He cannot act, in my opinion, as though he has a national mandate for his agenda . . . I believe . . . he wants to reach across the aisle.
Thomas Mann: 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. . . . 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.
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.
Appointments Process
Watson: 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 . . . 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.
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.
Ornstein: 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 was gone before you actually had your team in there to implement policy. Given this year's thirty-six-day delay and the continuing hurdles in getting people in place, we're probably talking about a year or more, a quarter of the presidency gone before you have these key people in place.
