White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Trump’s Washington: A Government of Strangers

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Prepare for a government of strangers: people we don’t know and haven’t met.

That government, those strangers, or mostly strangers, will shape the presidency of Donald Trump — not the slogans, not the declarations of intentions, not the hopes of those who threw in with Trump, but the merging of those interests represented by officeholders who aren’t well known in Washington or the nation.

In the short time between now and Jan. 20, the Trump transition team has to come up with some very key players, who eventually will have to be confirmed by the Senate — an easier prospect with a Republican-controlled Senate, but not a slam-dunk.

In relations with the world’s nations, some of whom Trump has vigorously unfriended during the campaign, these jobs will be of first importance, including secretary of state; secretary of defense; national security adviser; secretary of the treasury; and secretary of energy (often forgotten as a defense agency), who is the keeper of our nuclear arsenal.

Domestically, Trump needs to name quickly staff at the White House, especially the Office of Management and Budget, which, within short weeks of climbing aboard, must prepare a budget for him to send to Capitol Hill. That budget will be, in many ways, the first indication of how Trump plans to govern. Republican as much as Democrats will be leery of what it contains.

After those critical positions, there are an incredible 4,000 additional positions to filled, 100 of which require Senate confirmation.

The conservative think tanks in Washington stand ready to heed the call, and maybe to provoke it, if they have an in. The think tanks are sounding boards for political ideas, like what to do about health care, foreign policy and trade, but they also represent something of a government in exile.

When a party is defeated, the ranks of the think tanks sympathetic to that party swell. Expect to see the Brookings Institution, the Progressive Policy Institute, the Economic Policy Institute and the New America Foundation find places for those leaving the Obama Administration.

Likewise, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the newer Foreign Policy Initiative will be ready to disgorge their best to serve in government.

It is a changing of the guard that takes place with each election that results in a change of party.

After the think tanks, or maybe in lockstep, come the universities. Look for Obama refugees to show up at places like Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government: a kind of halfway house for politicos. MIT and Stanford expect to have their faculty raided for the top jobs in the department of defense, energy and homeland security. Whether Trump and his people will raid these larders of talent is unknown.

Normally, White House watchers have a trail of crumbs to follow. They can say so-and-so was at college with the president, that professor so-and-so helped him form a position on nuclear power, or some think-tanker may have had a role in the campaign.

The Trump the clues are meager. Only four names stand out: Steve Bannon of Breitbart News, his campaign’s chief executive, Kellyanne Conway, his campaign manager, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, his transition team head, and Sean Hannity of Fox News. Another clue: Many on the campaign staff once worked for Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.).

Journalists will be watching the Trump camp just as Kremlin watchers in the days of the Soviet Union watched for hints out of Moscow. How will Trump govern? Who will staff his administration?

While Trump and his administration get settled in, while they find out how enormously complicated and far-flung the responsibilities of the U.S. government are, the day to day running of the country will be with the disparaged civil service: the bureaucrats so despised by Trump the campaigner, now his vital aides in transition.

— For InsideSources

Photo credit: Alex Barth, “Washington Monument” Washington DC, 2009. Used under the Creative Commons Generic 2.0 license

Beltway Job Seekers Are Rested and Ready for the New President

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By Llewellyn King

If one of the presidential hopefuls, with the exception of Hillary Clinton, wins the presidency, the first thing he will need is the telephone number of a really good recruitment firm.

“Is this the Manpower company? Yes, well this is the president. I want you to come up with 1,400 top executives and, this is important, they must be able to be confirmed by the United States Senate — no lovers, no drunks, no druggies, and no financial cowboys. All right then, how about 100 smart ones and 1,300 warm ones with nice families?”

The fact is that the president has a job that is not always anticipated: personnel officer in chief. Of those who might get the presidency, the one who will be the least challenged in filling out the 1,400 jobs that require a nod from the Senate, Clinton has the best Rolodex of potential appointees. She should have. She has been around Washington since her husband was president. And that means that every Democratic political retread in the capital, will be petitioning for work.

As first lady, senator and secretary of state, Clinton has had plenty of opportunity to stuff her Rolodex. Less so Bernie Sanders, who was a loner in the Senate and who seems not to have sat in on any discussions on foreign policy. He, like so many politicians, knows people who agree with him, which means he has a good grip on the cost of university education to students, or the way medicine was nationalized in other countries.

Likewise, Ted Cruz can probably lay his hands on a few good tax-cutters and gold-standard adherents, but he may be a bit stretched when it comes to people who know about the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict or the supplies of flu vaccine for 2017.

John Kasich knows people from his time in Washington: people who are biding their time in the think tanks, where they have been holed up since past Republican administrations. Talk about Beltway insiders!

Trump knows people in real estate and people in show business, and he is his own adviser, by his own boast. He, more than the rest, is going to need help in getting help. How do you find people able to renegotiate every treaty on the books, which is the core of his foreign policy?

Let alone staffing a government, Trump will have difficulty in staffing even the transition team, so vital in a smooth transfer of power. So much to learn, which is hard when you are stuck in transmission. Does he know that the U.S. Geological Survey is part of the Interior Department, or the Secret Service part of Treasury? Does Sanders know that sensitive areas need career ambassadors, and cronies and buddies are for safe appointments, like Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

There is a long history of presidents who have been hurt or hindered by who they knew when they were elected. Ronald Reagan knew a lot of people and had less than usual trouble in staffing. But even so, his energy transition chief Michel Halbouty, a wildcatter from Texas, was floored when he heard the Department of Energy made and maintains nuclear weapons. Bill Clinton suffered what might be called the “Arkansas deficit” for the first years of his administration.

In the think tanks, left and right, former office holders and those itching to hold office hang out writing op-eds, making speeches and hoping they are headed for government. The has-beens and never-weres are rested and ready.

Trump, with no contacts where he would need them, would blunder, mistaking businessmen for statesmen. He could fall prey to a right-wing think tank, like the Heritage Foundation. Retired military also have agendas, and are keen to implement them on militarily-challenged new presidents.

Cruz is in danger of being taken in by extreme guys like Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, and neocon Elliott Abrams, who urged another neophyte, George W. Bush, into the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Sanders is the man to thrill a bearded-and-sandaled crew from the universities. Maybe some advice from perennial man of the people Ralph Nader.

Hillary will bring out the human equivalent of the best of the political thrift shops: good in their day– yesterday.

The job fair opens Nov. 9.

Republicans Need an English Lesson from Thatcher and Blair

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Before Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, Britain was in trouble and headed for worse. The story was told on radio news every morning. Along with the weather and the traffic reports, there was daily a list of trouble spots of a different sort: industrial action.

 

Industrial action was the euphemism of the time for strikes; most of them unofficial, all of them debilitating. The national mood was sour, the economy perilous, and Britain’s international competitiveness was slipping fast. Commentators around the world talked about “the English disease.”

 

Thatcher’s challenge was to curb the unions; but before she could do that, she had to convince a doubting nation that the unions could become, or be made, responsible. Over the years, the unions had amassed quite extraordinary power that reached into lives of people who had never thought they were affected by unions.

 

Union excess was everywhere but because the British believed in the importance of unions, their strengths and excesses were taken as the necessary price for the fundamental right of collective bargaining.

 

The Labor Party derived much of its support and financing from the union movement. They were structurally entwined: The unions represented the core, or the “base,” of the party. Unfortunately for Labor, the base was toxic and threatened the health of the economy and, as the election of 1979 showed, the electability of the party.

 

Thatcher, though hard to love, did three enormous things for Britain. She restored the primacy of the free market, curbed union excess and, ironically, saved the Labor Party. Thatcher’s changes made it possible for what was to be called New Labor to modify its relations with its trade union base. The politicians got back the politics, which had been progressively assumed by union bosses of the base.

 

The British experience is redolent with lessons for the Republican Party. The “base,” represented by the aggressive broadcasters like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham, is goading the party in Congress to adopt positions that satisfy them, but not the electorate.

 

Building on the new reality created by Thatcher’s Conservatives, Tony Blair and his political brain, Peter Mandelson, were able to discipline or silence the trade unions in the Labor Party and present an alternative to the Conservatives that could plunder the best ideas of the right. When nobody was looking, Blair must have thanked God for Thatcher.

 

The agony of the Republicans is clearly on display with the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court: To oppose her blindly is to kiss off millions of Hispanic voters, maybe for generations. The party clearly had no strategy to deal with a candidate like Sotamayor. None.

 

The far right came out with, well, with an old argument: She is a liberal activist. Not much evidence of that, but the conservative talk-show hosts were ready for war. The last war. Or the one before that.

 

More damaging to serious Republicans has been the conversion, almost entirely on Fox, of respected Republican philosophers into political Vaudevillians. Enter, center stage, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee and Karl Rove. Their collective TV antics are damaging to the movement they once led.

 

A lot of good thinking about the future of the Republican Party is taking place in the think tanks, particularly the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. But the solid work of restructuring the party for the new realities at home and abroad is drowned out by the eponymous broadcast wing of the party.

 

It is hard to believe that Newt Gingrich, broadcaster, is the same Newt Gingrich who masterminded the 1994 Republican midterm sweep. Or that Karl Rove was the genius who saw that George W. Bush could be presented as a convincing presidential candidate.

 

Absent any possibility of reform of the Republican base from the outside, in the Thatcher way, it has to come from the inside. Several astute conservative writers, like David Frum and Mickey Edwards, have lighted a path. A first step down that path could be a more even-handed examination of President Obama’s Supreme Court picks. He could have as many as four of them in his first term. Clearly he has an eye to the electorate, as much as to jurisprudence, if Sotomayor is a harbinger.

 

Thatcher built herself an entirely new base. Blair dismantled an old one. The Republicans need to examine both.