Back in 1916, President Woodrow Wilson was seeking reelection as the United States was about to make a crucial decision whether to enter the First World War. Anxious to avoid a devastating void in authority had he lost, he drew up a secret plan. In the event of defeat, Wilson decided, he would at once appoint his victorious Republican opponent as secretary of state. The lame duck president and vice-president would then resign and the new secretary of state would, as the constitution stipulated, become president.
In the event, Wilson won, but the problem of America’s protracted and unwieldy presidential transitions is still with us. “The United States has only one government and one president at a time,” declared Barack Obama at his first public appearance after defeating John McCain on Nov. 4, showing the appropriate deference to George W. Bush who, after all, would be calling the White House home — and controlling the country’s nuclear launch codes — until 12 noon on Jan 20.
But that was then. This is now, more than five weeks later, with America tumbling deeper by the day into its worst economic crisis in decades. Bush is still in the White House (though tangible signs of his presence are hard to detect).
In an odd way, however, Obama is right. The US does have only one government. Except that, in many respects, it is headed by himself and operates not in Washington, DC but out of the high-rise building just off Michigan Avenue in the heart of Chicago where the President-elect has his transition office.
In America, the process — part change of government and part coronation — takes 11 stately weeks. Never, though, has it seemed as excruciatingly drawn out as now.
For one thing, of course, no modern president has been as unpopular for as long as George W. Bush. For the candidate of his own Republican Party, he was the great unmentionable of the campaign, a Republican incumbent who was requested to stay away from the Republican convention. Today, America pays no attention to him, and cannot wait to be rid of him.
Apart from buying a retirement house in an upscale Republican neighborhood of Dallas, Bush’s activities these days consist of self-justificatory media interviews, and a flurry of eleventh-hour executive orders aimed at extending his influence beyond his departure, and which the Obama team is already studying how to nullify. As he slinks from office, the main speculation surrounding the 43rd President concerns the names of those he will pardon. Any takers for Conrad Black?
But the second reason is much more important. Not since Franklin Roosevelt took over from Herbert Hoover has an interregnum been as fraught with peril — and for similar reasons. This global economic crisis will no more respect the venerable rhythms of the US Constitution than did the Great Depression in 1933. At a moment when everyone — markets, businesses and ordinary workers and consumers alike—– looks to government for answers, a sense that there is no functioning government could be disastrous.
That explains why in 2008 the stock market did not stage its habitual “presidential” rally upon Obama’s victory. Wall Street did move sharply higher on Nov. 4 itself, but slumped immediately thereafter. Its next gain of note did not come until word leaked that Obama would nominate Timothy Geithner, the president of the New York Federal Reserve, to be Treasury Secretary.
But the 500-point surge by the Dow Jones index in a single hour was less a vote of confidence in Geithner (a key player in the Bush administration’s less than magisterial handling of the financial meltdown) than a collective sigh of relief among traders that Obama was doing something to remove uncertainty. In such turbulent times, a 77-day transition is a lifetime. “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born,” noted Antonio Gramsci, the Italian political thinker and Marxist: “In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Gramsci was writing in 1930, from one of Mussolini’s prisons. But his words capture to perfection today’s drama in the citadel of world capitalism.
Obama’s calculation is that by moving quickly, the “morbid symptoms” can be kept to a minimum. As a result, his transition has been a model of brisk efficiency. Since his election, a team of 500 people has been at work, funded by $12m of public and private money. In fact, and in keeping with most presidential candidates, he had discreetly set up a skeleton transition operation long before the election.
In Obama’s case, the process was set in motion last summer when he finally secured the Democratic nomination. But sometimes it can begin much sooner — even before the first primary vote is cast. For instance, George W. Bush, then Governor of Texas, asked his close aide Clay Johnson to develop “a plan for what we do after we win” as early as spring 1999, fully 18 months before the 2000 election.
Presumptuous? Perhaps. But given the deadlock in Florida that delayed his victory until mid-December, and cut the standard transition period in half, such foresight was no bad thing. Ronald Reagan also began transition planning well before his election. In his case, too, it paid off, with early victories on the budget and tax cuts.
The most shambolic transition in modern times was conducted by Bill Clinton. Not that his staff hadn’t been working on the matter before the election; the problem was that after his victory, he tore up the preparations and started again from scratch.
Instead of pulling an administration together, Clinton the President-elect convened a series of rambling policy talk-ins, and took no major personnel decisions until shortly before Christmas 1992. And those first appointments were to cabinet positions. Only shortly before his inauguration did Clinton settle on his all-important White House senior staff — the people who make the wheels of a presidency go round. The result was the most chaotic start by a new incumbent in memory. Clinton’s first two nominees for Attorney General bit the dust after it emerged that both had employed illegal immigrants as nannies, while his first days were consumed by a self-inflicted row over gays in the military.
Thus far, however, the Obama transition leaves not just Clinton, but Bush, Reagan and everyone else standing. Wisely, he started at the White House, naming Chicago congressman Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff – a job that can be the second most-powerful post in government. At the time of writing, some 20 other senior White House aides have also been named.
The major Cabinet posts have been filled, and several members of the supporting cast are known as well. Of the national security “principals,” only the next director of the CIA remains to be chosen. Maybe the Woodrow Wilson solution is extreme — but might not an amendment to the Constitution be in order, moving up Inauguration Day from Jan. 20 to, say, early or mid-December?
