White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

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.

When Ralph Nader Was the Consumer’s Hero

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Ralph Nader is to blame. It's that simple. I'm not talking about the election of 2000, where his candidacy was enough to hand the presidency to George W. Bush and all that has followed. I’m talking about when Nader went AWOL as the nation’s consumer conscience.

In the space of a week, three U.S. flights have been diverted because of passenger disturbances over reclining seats. Would this have happened if Nader of old were on the case?

In the mid-1960s and early 1970s, Nader was the nation’s bulwark against corporate excess. He may have gotten it wrong — as many have claimed — about the safety of the Corvair, the rear-engine compact car, manufactured by the Chevrolet division of General Motors, that was to have rivaled the Volkswagen Beetle. No matter. Nader’s 1965 book, “Unsafe at Any Speed,” launched him as the consumer's knight in shining armor.

For nearly a decade, we felt that Nader was on our side and those big, faceless monsters like insurance companies, banks, airlines, consumer credit outfits and appliance manufacturers could be brought to heal by invoking the one name that would strike fear, trembling and rectitude into the hearts of the titans of corporate America: Nader.

It was a halcyon time for those who wanted, like actor Peter Finch in the 1976 film “Network,” to shout, and be heard, “I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!”

Nader was a figure of mythical omnipotence. You didn’t have to take your troubles with a faulty car or broken contract to Nader, you simply had to threaten; the words “cc Ralph Nader” at the bottom of a letter were enough. Corporations quaked, the earth moved, and restitution was forthcoming.

We delighted in learning little details about Nader the aesthete, who lived in one room somewhere in Washington, had no creature comforts, partners, or trappings, but always wore a suit. People happily believed he slept in it, ready to rush to court to slay a dragon of corporate excess.

Journalists loved Nader. We learned that he kept a secret office in the venerable National Press Building in Washington and would sneak up to the National Press Club on the 13th floor to peruse the press releases, which were then displayed near the elevators. One presumed he was looking for evidence of consumer abuse in false corporate claims.

The Vietnam War was raging, and the nation was divided on every issue except the wonder of the man who was called “consumer advocate.” The nation had never had one before and we loved it.

Oh, yes, love is not too strong a word. We went to bed at night knowing that if the mattress wasn't what had been promised by the Divine Mattress Company, Nader would fix it.

Jimmy Carter promised that when he was elected president, he would have a direct telephone line to St. Nader. That was the zenith of Nader’s consumer advocacy power.

But Nader and his acolytes, known as Nader’s Raiders, had already begun to pursue broader political aims and to embrace the extreme reaches of the environmental movement. Nader, our beloved consumer advocate, saintly and virtuous, was becoming a partisan — a partisan of the left.

It was an extreme blow for those who had followed along behind Nader’s standard because we believed he was the unsullied, virtuous supporter of the individual against the institution. The voice that could be heard when, as often, politics had failed.

Over the years, I had battles with Nader. We argued most especially over nuclear power and a raft of related energy issues. I and the late physicist Ralph Lapp, together with the great mathematician Hans Bethe, put together a group of 24 Nobel laureates to support nuclear. Nader assembled 36 Nobel laureates against, and won the argument on numbers. He has always been a tough customer.

Poor Ralph. He had it all – and so did we — when he fought for the common man against the common enemy: those who stole our money or shortchanged us.

Deep in my heart, I think he is to blame for high bank fees, payday loans, tiny aircraft seats, high Amtrak fares, and the fact that corporations won’t speak to us – they have machines do that. Ralph, it could have been so different if you had just stayed at your post. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The ’60s Return

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The decade of the 1960s stood orthodoxy on its head. It was a time when alternative everything got a hearing. Expertise came into doubt; the phrase “some decisions are too important to be left to the experts” was heard everywhere.

The seer of the day was Ralph Nader. Government was only trusted as a regulator. So it regulated: the environment, the schools, the workplace, the airline industry, the communications industry, and new industries like nuclear power. Anything that had escaped regulation in the 1930s got swept up in new regulations. And those 1930s regulations for banks and utilities were applauded.

Well, this decade is beginning to emulate the anti-establishment passion of 50 years ago. In particular, a despised government is being asked to regulate.

Make no mistake, regulation is in the air. Even Republican free-marketeers are blaming a lack of regulatory oversight for the environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and the collapse of mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

We are headed back to the future because some, though not all, of the underlying drivers of the 1960s are in place today,

The core of our crises today is as it was then: a sense of betrayal by our institutions. In banking, the environment and foreign policy, the left and the right feel they have been let down. They may be deeply divided on the degree of regulation that is needed, but the sense that key areas of our national life are broken is pervasive.

Besides the lost jobs, diminished 401(k) savings, recriminations over troop levels and tactics in two wars, and mounting national debt, there is now the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf — a crowning failure, if you will. Taken together they wipe out confidence and bring opprobrium on big institutions.

Big is bad. Big is out. Big cannot be trusted. Big has no civic conscience, whether it is banks paying themselves too well in a time of shortage or oil companies failing to take care when punching holes in the ocean floor. Big screws up big time.

The collateral damage is that, like the 1960s, no one is going to believe the experts on almost anything. People are not going to believe that giant airliners are needed, nor that biotechnology is good for the food chain.

The 1960s brought on an age of studies which, like polling, have become a news staple. These studies pour out of universities, think tanks, government departments and consultancies. Mostly they serve the people who fund them, so they get a brief life in the 24-hour news cycle and then leave us confused.

Are mammograms good or bad? Is there too much heart surgery? Does television affect deductive reasoning? Is weight training better than aerobic exercise? Will red wine and oatmeal cookies keep you going for 100 years?

Despite the contradictions implicit in expertise, we were just getting used to taking experts seriously again. We believed that bankers were oh-so-clever that they deserved oh-so-much money for what they did. Now we know they were just oh-so-greedy.

We believed that Toyota made the best and safest range of cars in the world, and that those Japanese quality-assurance types had it all over everyone else. Ooops! Got that one wrong.

And we believed that the clever people in the government knew how to conquer Iraq and turn it into the democratic beacon for the region. Not quite.

The problem with this institutional failure is the damage it will do in the future. Who is going to believe that the next drug or vaccine is safe? We won’t believe the experts and their studies. Ditto new nuclear power plants (which I favor), bridges, roads, high-speed trains and innovative skyscrapers.

The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., lamented the decision-making freeze that prevented the creation of Westway, an elaborate and revolutionary highway and development project along Manhattan’s derelict Far West Side. In losing our faith in expertise, as we did in the 1960s, we lost our ability to take decisions.

Now it’s happening again. Thank you BP, AIG and Citibank. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate