There is a tougher but urgent transition ahead

On the morning of Nov. 5, whoever wakes up as president-elect should be able to answer a question that stumped Robert Redford’s character at the end of “The Candidate.”

“What do we do now?” said victorious California Sen.-elect Bill McKay, Redford’s character.

Presidents-elect have a far tougher job than new senators, who don’t have to set an agenda, prepare a budget or make major appointments.

Fortunately, Barack Obama and John McCain, like other recent nominees, already have transition operations to map plans for the next administration. Both campaigns reportedly hope to speed the process of clearing key national security advisers so they can get started on the problems they inherit Jan. 20.

Unfortunately, the growth in presidential appointees and an increasingly cumbersome clearance and nominations process means that, even with good intentions, the next president will need months to create a functioning government.

Transition expert Paul Light, a New York University professor, notes that John F. Kennedy took less than six months to install 200 top Senate-confirmed appointees. In 2001, President Bush took a year longer, in part because he had to fill 600 such jobs.

Clay Johnson, who supervised the Bush transition and will help to coordinate the coming one, told a transition-planning panel last week that Bush had only 25 top appointees in place by April 1 and about 230 to 240 by August.

On average, he said, it took 90 days from selection until confirmation. And the process could be even slower next year.

These delays make it hard for a new administration to implement the policy shifts it promised on the stump. What it can do is issue executive orders and propose revisions in the budget it will submit within weeks of taking office.

In a July article in the Los Angeles Times, Light suggested having the two campaigns announce a joint commitment to transition planning and start getting potential job candidates to fill out personnel forms before Election Day.

But even transition planning has become the subject of partisan criticism.

When word leaked in July that Obama had a transition operation, Republicans said he was presumptuous. When Time reported last week that McCain had asked veteran Washington lobbyist Bill Timmons to plan his transition, the Obama campaign cited him in a commercial criticizing the role of lobbyists in the McCain campaign.

Campaign pressures also detract from transition planning. In the past, some initial transition work was scrapped when campaign political operatives became involved after the election.

Online application form

A procedural barrier is that, unlike college applications, campaigns and congressional committees never agreed to use a uniform online application form for job candidates. Instead, committees insist on their own procedures and forms. And they could pose an even bigger problem if a Republican president-elect McCain has to get his nominees through a Democratic-controlled Senate.

Another problem, Johnson said, is that once an election is over, “every administration is overwhelmed by advisers, job seekers and advice givers.”

And transition planners may be jockeying for top jobs themselves.

While some of this is inevitable, veterans of past transitions agreed at last week’s panel discussion at the liberal Center for American Progress that the priorities for an Obama or McCain transition should be the White House staff and national security team.

Past transitions show the importance of all this.

By all accounts, Bush ran such an efficient transition in 2000 that his administration got off to a fast start. By contrast, Bill Clinton wasted time with distractions from an economic conference to an untimely fight with the Pentagon over gays in the military.

The result: a stumbling start.

X Carl P. Leubsdorf is Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.