Organizing the White House Is Obama's First Test, by Karl Rove
All presidents come to realize how much structure matters
Excerpts:
As he organizes his presidency, Barack Obama continues to receive glowing reviews. Three out of four Americans approve of how he's handling his transition.
But organizing and operating the White House will be a much bigger challenge than he can possibly yet understand.
Consider national security. Mr. Obama's team has the advantage of inheriting procedures and structures that stretch back to President Harry Truman's 1947 reforms, which created the National Security Council. But there's historically been tension over the roles of the national security adviser and secretary of state. How that tension is resolved depends largely on the able National Security Adviser-designate, James Jones.
Mr. Jones has been Marine Corps commandant and NATO supreme allied commander, posts whose occupants are treated as demigods. How easily will he fit into a staff role? Will Mr. Jones see his responsibility as ensuring the president receives a broad range of options, or will he put a higher priority on advocating his own substantive views? Could Mr. Jones's personal relationship with so many top brass undermine Secretary Robert Gates's control of the Pentagon during what could be Mr. Gates's last year at Defense?
[...]
To this complicated mix Mr. Obama has added a White House energy and climate-change czar, former Clinton-era EPA Administrator Carol Browner. Which raises these questions: Will the EPA and its legions of experts still lead policy development, or will the new climate czar? Will the CEQ lose authority to Ms. Browner? There are many strong people in Mr. Obama's environmental arena. Who's in charge, and how will those relationships shake out?
Mr. Obama's new Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary, Tom Daschle, has never run anything but will have responsibility for one of the government's most complicated departments. And while Mr. Daschle may have lost his last campaign, he's lost none of his skill at internecine warfare. The wily Washington insider also grabbed the title of director of the White House Office of Health Reform. The creation of this new Daschle-led office clearly downgrades both the DPC and the National Economic Council, which have traditionally split White House action on health issues. [...]
Finally, the Obama team continues discussing how to use its campaign email list. According to press reports, the aim is to "place pressure on key legislators." But that raises problems beyond irritating representatives and senators who will resent the White House for making their lives more difficult. Ethics and election law expert Tom Josefiak of Holtzman Vogel PLLC says the Obama White House should reread the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel's opinions about The Anti-Lobbying Act. One in 1988 warned: "We caution against grassroots appeals, even by the President, that involve substantial expenditures of appropriated funds." This suggests putting the email list on White House servers is a problem.
And who will direct and pay the organizers that the transition team may hire to lead these White House lobbying efforts? Former FEC Chairman Michael Toner, now of Bryan Cave LLP, says running a new grass-roots advocacy group out of the White House could create serious election-law difficulties. The FEC has imposed large civil penalties on some advocacy groups for failing to register as political committees and abide by hard-dollar contribution limits. Also, any White House advocacy group runs the risk of being treated as a Democratic National Committee affiliate, triggering shared contribution limits, reporting requirements, and a prohibition on soft-money contributions. Given Mr. Obama's professed support of campaign finance reform, he could ill afford any of these problems.
Mr. Obama is assembling a strong and intelligent team of people with muscular views and large personalities. Will the individual parts cohere into a well-functioning whole? Things that sound good often work less well in reality. Having served in the White House for nearly seven years and carefully studied how the modern presidency functions, it strikes me that some of Mr. Obama's steps may make smooth operations harder. [...]
Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.
About Karl Rove
Karl Rove served as Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush from 2000–2007 and Deputy Chief of Staff from 2004–2007. At the White House he oversaw the Offices of Strategic Initiatives, Political Affairs, Public Liaison, and Intergovernmental Affairs and was Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, coordinating the White House policy making process.
Before Karl became known as "The Architect" of President Bush's 2000 and 2004 campaigns, he was president of Karl Rove + Company, an Austin-based public affairs firm that worked for Republican candidates, nonpartisan causes, and nonprofit groups. His clients included over 75 Republican U.S. Senate, Congressional and gubernatorial candidates in 24 states, as well as the Moderate Party of Sweden.
Karl writes a weekly op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, is a Newsweek columnist and is now writing a book to be published by Simon & Schuster. Email the author at Karl@Rove.com or visit him on the web at Rove.com.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
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Cato @ Liberty (citations ommited, see original post): Obama’s Not-So-Centrist Cabinet, by David Boaz
ReplyDeleteDecember 23, 2008 @ 6:11 pm
Journalists continue to insist that President-elect Obama has named a largely centrist Cabinet. But they’re clinging to a storyline that might have been true two weeks ago but no longer is. Obama’s national security team — Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, and James L. Jones — and his economic team — Lawrence Summers, Tim Geithner, Christina Romer, and Bill Richardson — could be regarded as centrists, or at least as centrist Democrats.
But as the Cabinet selection process went on, Obama increasingly named left-wing activists to jobs in which they could carry out his ambitious plans to “transform our economy” and be the 21st-century Franklin Roosevelt. Tom Daschle at HHS wrote a book on how we need a Federal Health Board to manage and regulate every aspect of our health care. Hilda Solis at Labor is a sponsor of the bill to eliminate secret ballots in union authorization elections and of heavy regulatory burdens on business. She opposed the Central America Free Trade Agreement and generally opposes free trade. Shaun Donovan worked on affordable housing issues in the Department of Housing and Urban Development during the Clinton administration — just the policies that led to the mortgage crisis and then the general financial crisis. His reward for a job well done? He’s coming back as Secretary of HUD.
White House science adviser John Holdren is an old-time “running-out-of-resources” Paul Ehrlich cohort who disdains economics and famously lost a bet with Julian Simon on whether the prices of natural resources would rise, reflecting growing scarcity. He and Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy; former New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection chief Lisa Jackson as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency; and Carol Browner, former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Bill Clinton, as the White House's “energy/ climate czar,” are all global-warming catastrophists who see an urgent need to impose crushing burdens on the economy in the name of influencing the climate a century from now.
The choice of Tom Vilsack to be Secretary of Agriculture is said by the Washington Post to be an example of Obama’s moderation and intention to balance competing interests. You see, he’s popular with “groups representing big agricultural interests, which praise him for his support of biotechnology and subsidies for corn-based ethanol.” But also with groups that want to shift Ag dollars to smaller farms. So the question to be decided is who gets the gravy, not whether the gravy will be ladled out by Washington. There doesn’t appear to be anyone in the Obama Cabinet who will speak for the taxpayers’ interest. Or who will argue that it would best for the whole country to let the market work and not have the government pick any winners or losers.
Sometimes journalists just don’t seem to reconcile the “centrist” claim with their own understanding of Obama’s intentions. The Los Angeles Times, for instance, begins its article, “The Cabinet that President-elect Barack Obama completed on Friday is a largely centrist and pragmatic collection of politicians and technocrats without a pronounced ideological bent.” But two paragraphs later the authors note:
Obama wants this Cabinet to market and put in place the most dramatic policy changes in the country since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal: a mammoth program to improve roads and bridges; a healthcare system that covers more sick people at less cost; limitations on fossil fuels and greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming; big investments in energy efficiency; middle-class tax cuts along with a tax hike on wealthy Americans.
That doesn’t sound like the agenda for a pragmatic and non-ideological administration. That’s what you would expect from a bunch of statist ideologues who have been waiting years or decades for an election and a crisis that would allow them to fasten on American society their own plan for how energy, transportation, health care, education, and the economy should work. That’s not centrist, it’s a collectivist vision hammered out by Ivy Leaguers and activists over the past couple of decades. In its more idealistic formulation, it’s based on the premise that smart people know what the people need better than the people themselves do, and that command and control work better than markets and individual choice. In its more practical application, it’s interest-group rent-seeking dressed in the trappings of public interest.
The proof will be in the pudding, of course. It’s the policies that matter, not the people. But these are people who weren’t selected for the misty dream of listening “not to your doubts or your fears but to your greatest hopes and highest aspirations” but rather for their determination to ensure that “generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment . . . when we came together to remake this great nation.” And for their commitment to use “this painful crisis [as] an opportunity to transform our economy.”
And for the rest of us, this is a time to remember that limited constitutional government and free markets sustain life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness better than collectivist agendas carried out by powerful states.
The Rule of the Green Czar. By Kathy Shaidle
ReplyDeleteFrontPageMagazine.com, Friday, Jan 16, 2009
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=B733BA80-D8A2-42FD-8859-C15F36C5A6A1
Carol Browner, Barack Obama’s nominee for energy-environment “czar,” didn’t preside over the pardons of terrorists in the 1990s; she doesn’t owe thousands in back taxes; and she isn’t mired in an ongoing investigation. She is, however, a card-carrying socialist who used public office for political pressure and was accused of presiding over a department that treated intelligent African-Americans as “uppity.”
Until recently, Browner, whose official title will be “Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change,” was a “commissioner” of the Socialist International, the umbrella group for 170 “social democratic, socialist and labor parties” in 55 countries Specifically, she worked with the Commission for a Sustainable World Society. In the grand Soviet tradition of the “disappearing Commissar,” her biographical profile was deleted from the Socialist International’s website shortly after her appointment, but not before critics had a chance to scrutinize the group’s extreme, anti-capitalist agenda.
“Socialist International is precisely what it sounds like,” Steven Milloy explained on FoxNews.com. Milloy noted that the group “favors the nationalization of industry, is skeptical of the benefits of economic growth and wants to establish a more ‘equitable international economic order.’” The last phrase is inevitably a codeword for redistribution of wealth on a global scale. (See William R. Hawkins' related piece, “Obama's Environmental Agenda: Made in China.”) Thus, the Socialist International’s “organizing document” blames capitalism for “devastating crises and mass unemployment” alongside “imperialist expansion and colonial exploitation.” Similarly, Socialist International’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society, the organization’s action arm on climate change Browner worked on, “says the developed world must reduce consumption and commit to binding and punitive limits on greenhouse gas emissions.”
What makes Browner’s association with the Socialist International noteworthy is that, after the worldwide failure of socialism, she continues to share many of its anti-capitalist views – and if confirmed as climate czar, she promises to translate them into policy. For example, Browner, calls herself a “strong backer” of “utility decoupling.” Under “decoupling” schemes, utility companies will be required to provide less energy, while the government guarantees the companies steady or increased profits through “taxpayer subsidies” and “voluntary” conservation measures. In other words, taxpayers will be given grim Carter-era exhortations to put on sweaters rather than turn up the thermostat and be forced to pick up the tab for utility companies’ reduced earnings, while getting less energy in return.
Browner’s penchant for such dubious environmentalist schemes is just one troubling aspect of her nomination. Another is her history of abusing her office for political gain and a record on minority rights that can rightly be called troubling.
In 1995, Browner used her position at the EPA to lobby environmental groups to oppose the Republican-led Congress, faxing out documents opposing the GOP’s regulatory initiatives. In a rare show of political unity, Browner was condemned by Republicans and Democrats, who accused her of violating the Anti-Lobbying Act. A stinging letter to Browner from a bipartisan subcommittee of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee noted, “The concerted EPA actions appear to fit the definition of prohibited grass-roots lobbying...The prima facie case is strong that some EPA officials may have violated the criminal law.”
This was not the only time that Browner was accused of abusing her authority. According to a February 2001 report in Time magazine, the EPA was plagued with “festering racial problems” during Browner’s time in charge. One African-American EPA employee, Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, told Time that she’d been passed over for promotions for being “too uppity,” adding, "We [African-American employees] were treated like Negroes, to use a polite term. We were put in our place.” Coleman-Adebayo was later awarded $600,000 in damages in a settlement that found the EPA guilty of “discrimination and retaliation against whistleblowers.” Shortly thereafter, Congress passed the “No Fear” government whistleblower protection act in response to the Coleman-Adebayo v. Carol Browner decision. Dr. Coleman-Adebayo lamented in a recent interview, “The very woman I prevailed against in court is being elevated to a White House decision-level position.”
At least 150 EPA employees filed similar lawsuits during Browner’s time there. In one particularly bizarre incident, blogger Shawn Mallow notes, “Anita Nickens, an EPA specialist, and the only black present during a visit of Mrs. Browner, was told to clean the toilet prior to her arrival. Afterward, the rest of her white co-workers bragged about it.”
This lawsuit didn’t come up during Browner’s January 15 interview with Lois Romano of the The Washington Post. Instead, Browner joked with her interrogator about being a “czarina,” and bemoaned the fact that the list of Bush initiatives she plans “to roll back” is “unfortunately...rather long.”
Ultimately, it is Browner’s radical Green politics – of which her affiliation with the Socialist International is but one manifestation – that are the most troubling. Although Browner insists “we don’t have to choose between strong public health, environmental protections and a strong economy,” economists disagree. As the country reels from an economic recession, her policies may be just radical enough to snatch recession from the jaws of recovery.
Letter to the Editor in the Washington Timres, by Christopher C. Horner
ReplyDeleteCEI, January 14, 2009
http://cei.org/articles/global-government
I was in the room in The Hague in November 2000 when then-French President Jacques Chirac hailed the Kyoto Protocol, or "global warming" treaty, as "the first component of an authentic global governance." Then-European Union Environment Commissioner Margot Wallstrom seconded the sentiment when she told London's Independent that Kyoto was "not about whether scientists agree" but instead "about leveling the playing field for big businesses worldwide."
In truth, and as Europe is proving, its rhetorical bluster notwithstanding, no free society would do to itself what the Kyoto agenda requires. Hence the increased claims that this issue "is too important to be left to democracy." Once a group of our betters is empowered to determine our energy - and therefore economic, sovereignty and national security - concerns, this crowd get its way.
Kyoto, of course, was negotiated while Carol M. Browner led the Environmental Protection Agency - and with her participation despite unanimous Senate instruction against doing so. Her position with Socialist International reminds us precisely why a radical like Mrs. Browner has had a position created for her, so as to avoid disclosure and Senate scrutiny, to lord over actual, Senate-confirmed Cabinet officials. Taxpayer representatives should not approve funds for such a position unless and until they receive an honest accounting of the agenda and its champions' activities.
CHRIS HORNER
Senior fellow
Competitive Enterprise Institute
Washington