Q: What are some of the particular challenges that the incoming president faces in 2008?Burke: I don't think so at all. I think one of the challenges this year during the transition is that they are going to have to move very quickly on a number of different fronts to begin the process of governing.
Read the complete interview after the jump.Burke: Number one, because it is the first post-9/11 [transition], that means that the whole issue of getting your homeland security team up and running early during the transition is a new task that prior presidents haven't had to face. Secondly, because we're fighting two wars, making sure that your foreign policy team is in place early is much more important in the upcoming transition. And then third, making sure your economic team is in place given the financial crisis and a recession and so on. So on three different fronts, the pressure during this transition is much greater, I think, than transitions in the past.
Q: When should candidates start thinking about the transition?
Q: There seems to be so much secrecy surrounding the transition process. Why is that?Burke: It depends upon the candidate. And it usually begins very early. One of the interesting things about George W. Bush's transition to office is that he actually began in the spring of 1999, when he tapped his, in effect, gubernatorial chief of staff, Clay Johnson, to begin the pre-election transition process. Other candidates have started later. His father started shortly after Christmas of 1987. Jimmy Carter started right after he won the Pennsylvania primary, which I think was in April 1976.... As somebody who studies transitions, I think it's very, very important that they do begin that process early.
Q: How much overlap has there typically been between the campaign staff and the administration?Burke: Number one, the candidate doesn't want to be accused of measuring the White House drapes, as they say, too early. But I think more important than that... you have to be very careful that you don't distract the people who are working on the campaign from focusing on that task at hand.
Q: You cite Jimmy Carter as a role model for his successors in terms of how he approached the transition process. What did he do differently from his predecessors?Burke: It depends.... Undoubtedly some campaign people will be brought in after Election Day into the transition staff. And they may ultimately find themselves ultimately getting White House or other administration positions. George Stephanopoulos would be a good example of someone like that. Other campaign people are simply pure campaign people and they don't have any interest in serving in the new administration, and James Carville would be an example.
Q: You've quoted Harrison Wellford, who advised Bill Clinton's transition effort, as saying "you had a sense of amateur hour with Clinton." What are some of the mistakes that Clinton made in 1992 and how did that affect the beginning of his presidency?Burke: What Carter recognized as a political outsider -- as many governors who become president are -- is that he really did need to do a lot of transition planning before Election Day. And he really is the first president to undertake an extensive effort to do pre-election transition planning. In prior administrations, we find a little bit of it but not very much at all. There wasn't much, for example, in the [Dwight] Eisenhower transition, a little bit in the [John] Kennedy transition but not particularly significant, virtually none in the [Richard] Nixon transition.
Burke: Number one, right after the election there was a lot of discord internally among the Clinton people, and precisely the tension between the campaign staff and the people who were in charge of the pre-election effort. So it took Clinton a couple of weeks to straighten that out.... Second... is that it took him until mid-December to select a White House chief of staff. And that's problematic because the White House chief of staff is given the authority to both internally organize the White House, as well as to fill most of the key White House positions....Q: What are some of the first decisions a president-elect needs to make?
That becomes important because you really do have to rely on your White House staff early on in the administration, especially during that initial honeymoon period. Because even though you'll have your Cabinet in place, it increasingly takes a long period of time to get your sub-Cabinet appointees in place. It's been averaging about eight and a half months. So, if you take, let's say, the top 500 or 600 positions in the federal bureaucracy, you're lucky if you get 250 of them done by maybe August, which means that you can't rely as much upon the Cabinet and the sub-Cabinet for policy advice and so on during the first eight or nine months of a presidency -- which really are the crucial eight or nine months of a presidency.
Q: If you could give the incoming president one piece of advice for Nov. 5, what would it be?Burke: A president-elect is going to have to pare down their campaign agenda -- all the different things they've talked about and have been important to them during the campaign -- into a much tighter, focused and shorter group of things, maybe four or five, at the most, policy initiatives. And presidents who have come in with a laundry list of things, as for example Carter did in 1977, without prioritizing or perhaps delaying some things until later in the term, they've run into difficulty. So, whether it's [John] McCain or [Barack] Obama, they're going to really have to focus on, what are the three or four things that are most important to them and that is also going to be politically doable.
Listen to a snapshot of the interview below.Burke: That's tough. I would say this, since both are United States senators: Understand that how you operated as a senator is different from how you will make decisions as a political executive.... Presidents have to filter through more information. The process that leads into their decision-making is much more complex than it is for a United States senator, who may just rely on an aide or two.... The key thing is to understand in facing complex policy issues, that while you're the ultimate decider, you need an effective team and an effective process to enable you to make those decisions.
Comments