Some Misconceptions About Transitions

By Richard Brookhiser

The hum you hear coming from the Beltway is the chanting of transition mantras -- the phrases that rise to the lips of Washingtonians every time someone new moves into the Oval Office. Like other ritual phrases, transition mantras are hallowed by time; they may even contain traces of truth. But as a steady background blur, they are as dulling to the mind as New Age music.

Take that favorite with compilers of resumes, "Personnel is policy." This slogan reflects the fact that things don't happen just because the President- elect has said they will. All his ideas and campaign pledges depend for their execution on a hydra-headed Administration. If the hydra's ideas come to differ from the President's, strange things may ensue.

A classic instance of personnel shaping policy was President Richard ^ Nixon's embrace, in his first term, of the Family Assistance Plan, a form of guaranteed income for poor families. FAP was largely a Democratic proposal. The first draft was submitted by two Democratic holdovers in the upper bureaucracy who were so skeptical of getting a hearing that they referred to it as the Christian Working Man's Anti-Communist National Defense Rivers and Harbors Act of 1969. But their handiwork caught the eye of another Democrat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had come into the Nixon White House as a presidential assistant, and who blarneyed Nixon into endorsing the idea.

What this tale of triumphant personal policymaking leaves out is the fact that it could have occurred only in a vacuum. Richard Nixon had little interest in domestic affairs; the country, he once told Teddy White, "could run itself." Under a President as concerned with social issues as with the Sino-Soviet balance of power, all the holdovers in the world would have had little effect.

The larger truth is that though presidential appointees and the career bureaucrats over whom they preside can do or undo a great deal, the decisive factor is will at the top. A President who is engaged can sustain loyalists and thwart the deviant. When the attention of the White House wanders, entropy sets in.

Another November-to-January slogan holds that the new Administration should "hit the ground running." The personnel (who are policy), should be picked as soon as possible -- the implicit assumption being that unless your people get a head start, they will be lost in the shuffle.

George Bush, who has been filling senior slots at a fairly brisk pace, has been criticized for not filling them more rapidly. In fact, the Bush transition has in some respects been going on for a long time. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and Secretary of Education Lauro Cavazos, whom Bush has reappointed to their Cabinet posts, first took over from their Reaganite predecessors months ago. How much good early appointments will do Bush is another question. The last transition team, Ronald Reagan's in 1980, hit the ground stumbling. Its selection of second- and third-level personnel was notoriously constipated. Yet Reagan managed to present historic budget and tax messages to Congress early in 1981. It was clearly more important to have ideas handy than people.

The last transition truism is that bipartisanship is a "good thing." Bipartisanship won its good name in the great days after World War II, when Democrats and Republicans pulled together to rebuild the world, and politics was thought to stop at the water's edge. These days, bipartisanship is typically invoked as the solution to problems on American dry land, mostly economic. The problem crying out for bipartisan handling this season is the deficit. The new Administration, we're told from every side, must prepare to work with Democrats in Congress and with Republican free spirits such as Bob Dole to fashion some acceptable compromise, particularly on the inflamed issue of taxes. Since the only compromise between no new taxes (Bush's campaign position) and some new taxes (the congressional position) is some new taxes -- i.e., a victory for Congress -- the call for compromise is, in some mouths, disingenuous. That won't stop columnists and other transition watchers from intoning it.

What all the transition mantras have in common is diminishing the importance of politics. After a two-year presidential campaign, it is understandable that Washingtonians should want to give politics a rest -- understandable, but unrealistic. Any Administration that wants to go beyond caretaking must concern itself with more than neutral administrative techniques. It must set goals, rally support and isolate enemies -- all political tasks. Defining an agenda for the new personnel is a political task. So is laying out a program. Politics does not stop when the voting does. Governing, like war, is a continuation of politics by other means.

Bipartisanship doesn't make the job of governing any easier. Different parties exist because politicians and voters, broadly speaking, have different ideas. The only way of giving any idea a fair trial is to express it as forcefully as possible. Achieving bipartisan forcefulness is like driving with the brakes on.

In this light, the election of liberal Democrat George Mitchell as Senate majority leader was a welcome dissonance in the general harmony. The outgoing leader, Robert Byrd, for all his attractive qualities, was a case of false advertising. The courtly, personally conservative West Virginian did not accurately represent the party of Tom Harkin and Howard Metzenbaum. Bennett Johnson, one of the losers in the leadership contest, would have been bad for the same reason. With Mitchell, what we see is what we'll get. Better a Teddy Kennedy copy than a Lloyd Bentsen copy. Republicans can take comfort from the fact that whenever partisan competitions have been framed in conservative- liberal terms during the past 20-odd years, they've tended to win.

The bad thing about the depoliticizing bromides of the transition is that they can confuse spectators and mislead the players. The good thing is that they have short life-spans. About the time the first Washington blizzard paralyzes Pennsylvania Avenue, reality will have set in.