White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Trump Needs to Turn to the Graybeards for Stealthy Help

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Will he rise to the office of president, or will he become some sort of mad uncle hidden away in one of his properties, railing against the media on Twitter? The Donald Trump presidency is in the balance even before it has begun.

Nonetheless, there will be a government, and there will be a devolution of power to the many offices of government. For that to work smoothly, President-elect Trump needs to show he can manage as well as deride by tweet. Didn’t he have a Cabinet list of some sort at the back of his mind? Transition is a president’s first test.

Those who voted for Trump — for a new broom, for an end to government by elites — aren’t seeing a new dawn, but rather a chaotic search among the retreads and by a search team that itself is fractured. A little amateurism is refreshing, a lot clownish.

Some of the confusion was anticipated. It’s hard for an outsider to take over the complex structure of the government. The answer should’ve been for Trump to reach out to people who know Washington, people who have substantial contact lists, people who could guide him unobtrusively and skillfully.

Trump needs a graybeard.

Washington’s graybeards have been the savior of many in crisis. Mostly they are lawyers, like the late Robert Strauss and the late Clark Clifford. They are operatives who slide in and out of the White House or wherever, guiding, advising and suggesting. All great presidents have used them.

Ronald Reagan sought out Howard Baker to be his chief of staff and counselor when his administration was in trouble over Irangate. He was an exception in that he was already a commanding figure as the Republican leader in the Senate. He saved Reagan. Baker went into the White House as chief of staff, but the classical graybeard is a counselor who doesn’t want office himself or herself.

Probably Trump would be best served by having a former governor at his elbow, defending the new president from the agenda-driven office-seekers. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie came close, but his own thirst for office most likely clouded his full usefulness to Trump.

Christie, along with Mike Pence, could’ve sorted through the large and permanent rump of those who have Potomac Fever: a passionate desire to be in government or back in government. It rages in the think tanks and the political science departments of universities. They, the feverish, wait for the call. Someone needs to know the competent, even the great, from the purely ambitious.

Who the president-elect picks now determines the success of the first 100 days of the president. And ever since FDR, presidents are judged on the first 100 days: days in which Trump has promised much, from starting on the “beautiful wall” to repealing Obamacare.

So far, all the names mentioned in the speculation have also been office-seekers. Two have had their dreams come true: Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon, someone who would quickly fill any vacuums with his own acolytes, ready to push the agenda of the alt-right — a nice way of saying “fringe.”

It is reasonable to expect the Trump administration to move to the right. But it is less reasonable to see it move from leaning right to veering wildly into the dogma and policies that are outside of public tolerance. In short, leaning toward Reagan is fine; toward George Wallace is not. Leaning toward George W. Bush is OK.

There are broad but accepted parameters in which America will accept the ideology of its president.

The president has limited ability to act domestically; and to achieve any of his declared aims is going to take patience as well as compromise. That takes the suavity of a graybeard consigliere, something missing at present.

If Trump doesn’t get a grip on his transition, he’ll guarantee a wounded administration from the start.

He needs someone who can guide him without seeking office for his or herself. A call to former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour might be a good start.

The situation is dire. The tweet stops here.

For InsideSources

Photo credit: Untitled by Evert Barnes. Use under the Creative Commons Generic License

The Choice — Gender Politics or Shake, Rattle and Wobble

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On Tuesday, I’ll apprehensively, haplessly, hesitatingly, joylessly, morosely and reluctantly cast my vote for president.

I don’t subscribe to the journalistic piety that journalists should conceal their preferences and not vote, or that having a point of view makes it impossible to be fair. This is the kind of virtue signaling favored by the former editor of The Washington Post, Leonard “Len” Downie, and by CNN host Anderson Cooper. I don’t think it’s altogether bad for the public to know where their writers and broadcasters are coming from.

But the truth is, I can’t decide for sure this election.

After watching all the debates, having read hundreds of thousands of words and wasted hundreds of hours in conjecture with friends and colleagues, I can’t say I’ve decided so completely that I’ll go with certainty into the booth.

Yes, I lean ever so slightly toward Hillary Clinton. I know her, so to speak; and there’s the rub. I know she is ambitious, hardworking, micro-managing, secretive and that she has no commanding vision for America at home or abroad. I also know that she’ll try to turn the country into an experimental social science laboratory.

My uncertainty went up a few notches with her declaration that she wants at least half her Cabinet to be women. I did my time in the trenches of the women’s movement in the 1960s: I’m for equality everywhere and redress where it is needed. But to be told in advance that half the Cabinet would be women is playing gender politics with the national well-being.

So, I veer toward Donald Trump: a man who has led a life as reprehensible as it has been lucky. Here we have a scoundrel, a sleaze, a sexual cad and a braggart of Olympian proportions. Yet the fascination is there; the hope that he is a man on a horse who will shake up the elites in Washington, from the cozy foreign policy establishment to the education lobby, which demands more money for worse outcomes.

The rot starts in the universities: high tuitions, self-regarding professors and irrelevant courses. Trump says he can fix everything so, for a moment, I think he can fix the universities too.

Napoleon fixed almost everything: the educational, economic and legal systems. But Trump is no Napoleon: He is a man of organic ignorance, apparently sustained by his own slogans.

Even if Trump were eminently desirable, as an outsider, he’d be faced with huge challenges in appointing a government: 4,000 jobs, 100 of which need Senate confirmation.

In Trump’s case, knowing no one and nothing of the myriad responsibilities of the government, his vice president, Mike Pence, could become the de facto president.

But Pence is a man of rectitude and Trump is the opposite. They’re bound to clash; thereafter, Pence being exiled to the official vice presidential residence at Number One Observatory Circle.

Hence vacuums everywhere and eager, shady people to fill them. People we’ve never heard of before; the first of whom will be recruited by the Trump transition team, led by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. One can just imagine the names in his Rolodex.

The fiefs will spring up, secure in the knowledge that the president isn’t interested or doesn’t know how his administration works.

In a Trump government, things would shake, rattle and wobble.

Like millions of Americans I must decide whether I want Clinton with her record of challenged veracity, stretching back to the Rose Law firm in Little Rock, Ark., or the monstrously awful Trump, whose appeal is that he’s not Clinton. Vote wisely, won’t you?

For InsideSources

 

Photo source: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trump_%26_Clinton.jpg

Rattled by the Ghosts of Presidents Past

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The ghosts of presidents past are haunting me.

I look at Hillary Clinton and she morphs into Jimmy Carter: all facts and figures and no direction.

I look at Donald Trump and he morphs into George W. Bush: all intention without knowing how things work.

Carter was earnest to a fault. He loved to bore into the details even when he should have been thinking about big, directional issues. Former Energy Secretary James Schlesinger told me how Carter had gotten lost in the intricate scientific issues of catalytic converters at a White House meeting. Knowing how many great issues were awaiting Carter’s attention, Schlesinger was appalled.

Bush’s weakness was what could easily become Trump’s weakness: Bush simply didn’t know enough about, well, anything. He was not a stupid man; actually, he was very quick. But he did not come to the office with a well-stocked mind. That left him vulnerable to all kinds of agenda-driven experts, especially his vice president, Dick Cheney.

Bush simply had never been curious. Cheney, with a lot of knowledge and a hard edge, took foreign policy upon himself. Bush did not wrest it from him until it was too late.

Carter’s passion for detail worked well in forming the Camp David Accords, but was disastrous in leading the country forward. As the result of a dinner party conversation with the journalist Rod MacLeish, Carter became fascinated with France’s constitution, known as the Constitution of the Fifth Republic. It combines presidential and parliamentary concepts.

MacLeish told me that the interest persisted until the very day of the announcement of the Camp David Accords, when Carter called him with more questions, ahead of CIA briefing on France’s constitution. MacLeish blurted out his surprise that the president would find time for this exercise on a day so critical to his presidency. Carter allowed that as he had scheduled a briefing on the constitution from the CIA later that day, he intended to be prepared for it. “That’s how I work, Rod,” he told MacLeish, as reported to me. Wow!

I doubt that Clinton would be that detail-compulsive, but she is a policy wonk and policy wonks get lost in policy, usually forgetting the ultimate purpose. Like Carter, Clinton seems to have no idea about how all the policy bits will fit into a grand scheme for the country in the years ahead.

Two other concerns about Clinton are her penchant for secrecy and her tendency to pettiness, demonstrated in her e-mails with Sidney Blumenthal. But overshadowing those are her inability to synthesize information into a course of action: Carter redux.

A Trump presidency would appear to be hugely vulnerable to having large parts of it taken over by surrogates simply because they knew more. The secretaries of state, defense and treasury could easily become fiefs, where the president was left out of major decisions.

More worrying ought to be who Trump would put into these positions. He has made much of his potential Supreme Court nominees, but has given nary a hint about who would staff his administration.

The job hopefuls are all over Washington, burnishing their resumes and hoping that they will get on the short lists. The fear is that the very obvious players who surround Trump will make the decisions, led by ideologue Steve Bannon, assisted by those whose stars have dimmed: Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie.

Trump, like Bush, appears to lack curiosity and without curiosity, there cannot be a well-stocked mind. Nothing, but nothing, we have heard from Trump suggests wide knowledge or a thirst for it.

By contrast, Clinton clearly has a mind jammed with facts. But do they line up as a way forward or are they like Carter’s catalytic converter, a distraction? Is it to be a blind date with Trump or a reprise of a kind of factual gridlock, which we saw in Clinton’s failed healthcare plan?

The ghosts rattle me.

For InsideSources

Photo credit: Giant President Heads by artist David Adicke, photograph by WayTru 2007. Used under the Creative Commons 2.0 license.