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Learning from their mistakes

Political science professor part of effort to prepare next White House administration

In business, when one corporation goes after another, it's called a hostile takeover attempt.

When the same kind of thing happens in politics, it's called an election. The country and the CEO at the White House must go through one every four years.

Not surprisingly, the passing of power between presidential administrations has proven to be as sloppy as the politics preceding it.

Now, Terry Sullivan, associate professor of political science at Carolina, manages a new multi-institutional initiative designed to smooth out the bumps that can give a new administration a shaky start.

Called White House 2001, it's funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and is associated with an American Enterprise Institute initiative "Transition to Governing." Sullivan coordinates the project with Professor Martha Kumar, currently associated with the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership.

The White House is not simply a "spoil of victory," observed a former White House official. "It's the nerve center of the greatest government in the world and we ought to at least give it the same respect that you do when you take over a second-rate corporation."

In one of its projects, White House 2001 brought scholars from the Presidency Research Group, a section of the American Political Science Association, into an initiative called the White House Interview Project. It builds an institutional memory for selected White House offices.

Offices put under the lens are the chief of staff, staff secretary, the press office, the office of communications, the office of counsel to the president, the office of presidential personnel and the office of administration.

The interviews were not intended to unearth juicy anecdotes that have ripened into history.

It's not about history at all, Sullivan said, but political science, a discipline more interested in analyzing process than dissecting a president's personality or exposing his peccadilloes.

"Focusing on an historical detail often gets a researcher embedded in controversies and conflicts that have nothing to do with understanding how the White House works," Sullivan said.

The goal is to provide incoming staff with substantive, detailed information about how their offices have functioned over a period of six administrations and 30 years. It's information designed to allow a new White House staff to learn from other administrations' mistakes instead of their own, Sullivan said.

For example, one of the things that James Baker did exceptionally well was to serve as a gatekeeper to the Reagan Oval Office by keeping policy advocates from getting the chance to sell the president on their ideas before the staff had fully considered them.

"A White House chief of staff is always worrying how to figure out when somebody is getting through a `back door' into the Oval Office in order to step around the process," Sullivan said. "How they do that is the kind of thing we're interested in."

By controlling the president's schedule, the staff helps the president keep control of his agenda.

On June 15, the project in conjunction with the James Baker Institute will hold a conference in Washington, D.C., with chiefs of staff who have served the past six presidents to discuss the role of that office.

Among the participants: Howard Baker, Kenneth Duberstein and James Baker, who served Ronald Reagan; Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney, who both served under Gerald Ford; Thomas McClarty, Erskine Bowles and Leon Panetta, who served under Bill Clinton; John Sununu and Samuel Skinner, who served George Bush; and Jack Watson, who served under Jimmy Carter.

"The response of all these people has really been great," Sullivan said. "They welcomed the opportunity to talk about the lessons they learned the hard way.

"To a person, these people are glad that somebody is trying to do what we're doing."

The value of a fast start

Richard E. Neustadt, a pre-eminent scholar on the presidency, said every new administration could be characterized with three words: arrogance, adrenaline and naiveté. The description was particularly appropriate for the Clinton people, Sullivan said.

"Every new administration thinks they have been to the mountain top in running and winning a presidential campaign," Sullivan said. "They think nothing could be more complicated or trying than a national campaign."

What they must learn is that running the White House presents a different set of challenges and skills than winning it, Sullivan said.

The object of a campaign is to win one day at a time. Make a mistake one day and it's OK. It's sort of like losing a baseball game. You know it's a long season and you move on. Keeping score gets tougher in the White House. There's little tolerance for mistakes.

"Everywhere else in government, people listen to you in paragraphs," Sullivan said. "When you work in the White House, they listen to you in syllables. Everything you say and do reverberates around the world instantaneously. And people really aren't prepared for that."

Watergate aside, Nixon created the modern presidency with a successful transition to power in 1969, Sullivan said.

Ford's administration had a moderately successful transition that was overshadowed by his quick pardon of Nixon.

Carter's transition was a disaster because of his overblown agenda and his failure to understand the dynamics of how business gets done in Congress.

Reagan was successful; Bush moderately unsuccessful.

Clinton's transition was a disaster.

Early mistakes shape the way congressional leaders think about a new administration. Stumble out of the gate and an administration has to play catch up.

Bush undermined the confidence of Congress in his administration when he tried to push the nomination of the late Texas Sen. John Tower as secretary of defense.

Many people think that Clinton's administration stumbled in its first 100 days because he picked controversial issues -- such as allowing gays to serve in the military -- to fight for. That wasn't the problem, Sullivan said.

The fundamental problem was that only two senior staff members had been appointed by the first week of January prior to Clinton taking office.

"As a result of that he did not have a team that was prepared for what they were about to embark on," Sullivan said. "They lost the opportunity to control the public agenda, and when an administration loses that opportunity at the very beginning, there are plenty of sharks in the water that can take advantage."

"Everybody inside the Clinton administration and outside the administration knows that it was the worst transition in modern history, and it was because they weren't ready to govern," Sullivan said.

Use it or lose it

Sullivan said one of the valuable lessons learned from the project is that how well a campaign team adapts to governing depends on how well it can focus on the president's agenda and maintain that focus.

The strength of the early term of the Reagan presidency was that the Reagan team remained focused on a narrow agenda of cutting the size and expense of the federal government while increasing the size and strength of the military.

"The advantage of focus is that an administration is less susceptible to distractions, falling victim to all the people who would want to hijack the president's agenda," Sullivan said.

Sullivan said many people think a newly elected president carries from his win a reservoir of political capital, but a reservoir unlike any other.

Sullivan describes it as a "bank account presidency," a term he coined in the research literature, that allows you to only make one deposit and imposes an ever-constant service charge. "If you don't use it, you lose it," Sullivan said.

But, he added, this analogy is not exactly right because presidents can and have recovered political capital after having squandered it.

After Clinton's disastrous start it appeared he was doomed for failure and defeat in 1996, Sullivan said. But Clinton recharged his bank account by doing a good job. "How a president can manage a turnaround, reorganizing and refocusing, is another aspect of our project," he said.

Reagan built his reserve in the early days of his administration by the aplomb he demonstrated after the assassination attempt on his life. He used his rising capital to push his budget plan of tax cuts and increased military spending through Congress.

Bush recovered from his missteps with the military victory in Kuwait.

A chance to make a difference

One of the things most people do not know is the tremendous amount of turnover that occurs within a White House staff. The pressure and the pace take their toll: The average tenure for a senior assistant is 18 months.

A job in the White House means high pressure around the clock. Most of the people filling them are in their early 30s and have spouses and children they rarely get to see.

Staffers were asked: When did you know it was time to leave?

The answers touched on both their personal and professional lives.

Working in the White House demands giving up your life apart from the job.

Researchers calculated that a typical White House staffer spent an average of two hours a day with family -- between 9 and 11 at night. One told of how a child leaving his father's lap whispered "I'll see you next Sunday" as he went off to bed.

But wanting more time at home isn't the only reason why people leave the White House. A staffer who has been close to power in Washington and built a reputation of success often can cash in that experience outside government. That means getting into the private sector when your stock reaches its highest point.

Sullivan said he was interested in the project for many of the same reasons that attract people to the White House: "It's a chance to use my profession and training to render a public service and make a difference. It may sound trite, but in a public university, service is part of our job."

Of course, this is not the first time academics have tried to offer advice to incoming administrations, Sullivan said.

"There have been lots of attempts in the past to affect the presidential transition by giving professional advice to the White House," he said. "That advice has universally fallen on deaf ears, and I think for good reason.

"The people around the president are all individuals with accomplished careers in private enterprise and government service, and they are skeptical of getting advice from ivory-tower academics."

This project takes a different tack, though. Instead of offering advice, scholarly experts have compiled the cumulative lessons volunteered by experienced White House staff.

Come January, Sullivan will begin finding out how many of those lessons are heeded.

For more on the White House 2001 project, see http://whitehouse2001.org

Professor Sullivan is an expert on congressional presidential relations. His professional work includes articles published in leading political science journals, two books on the congressional process, and a current book on presidential bargaining and strategy. He is immediate past president of the Presidency Research Group and an associate editor of Presidential Studies Quarterly. He is managing the White House 2001 Project out of the James A. Baker Institute at Rice University in Houston. He will remain at the institute through the next administration's first six months to complete the White House 2001 project.

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