Eight months from now America will have its first president in nearly five decades with zero executive branch experience at the federal or state level. The shock to the new occupant of the Oval Office will be profound. Within a matter of weeks he will have to fill about 1,500 jobs and propose a legislative agenda all the while dealing with foreign adversaries who will seek advantage in a period of transition between administrations. Then, after a brief honeymoon–six weeks for McCain, six months for Obama–the press will turn relentlessly hostile.
Neither man is prepared, indeed no one can be fully prepared. But both are now running campaigns for an office that more closely resembles that of Senator of the United States than President of the United States. For the good of the country the sooner this changes the better. Both need to lay the groundwork for governing. The easiest place to start by far is with a legislative agenda.
Consider something obvious and unavoidable like taxes. McCain will “keep the Bush tax cuts.” Obama will get rid of them. Trouble is, McCain can’t “keep the Bush tax cuts”; they expire, so merely saying you’re going to keep them is hardly an act of economic leadership. Obama will get “change” on taxes simply through inertia; no leadership needed. But guidance would be useful. For example, inertia would take the top rate on capital gains back to 20 percent. Obama had said he wants it “no higher than when Ronald Reagan was president,” which means 28 percent. But his advisers publicly said 25 percent and in a recent interview on Fox News Sunday he dodged and weaved on the subject of rates.
By contrast, he did not bob and weave around a much bigger tax increase–lifting the cap that limits the income on which Social Security taxes are paid and benefits calculated. That would add 12.4 percentage points of tax to every person making over roughly $100,000. How does that square with not raising taxes on middle income families? Nor did he say what he would do about changing the formula that links benefits to taxes paid. Would Social Security stay a contributory system or become just a welfare scheme? The generally fawning press hasn’t asked these tough questions. If it doesn’t, the country will just have to find out what is behind the proverbial “Door Number One” after the election.
Both men say they want “cap and trade” systems for carbon emissions. It would be generous to call what their campaigns have put out on this even “works in progress.” But any scheme that actually reduces emissions must be a net tax hike on end users like drivers and homeowners with electric bills. How is this not a tax hike on middle income Americans? Both men have proposed radically different health care concepts, but again, the specifics are missing on how either would save money rather than raise the nation’s health care bill. The list goes on.
All of this is fine if one wants a senator. Once elected, that man will accomplish about as much as the Senate accomplishes on its own volition. To be a successful president, though, a candidate must make up his mind before he is elected.
One need only look at the two terms of Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton to get a sense of the difference running on a legislative agenda can make. In 2000 Bush laid out very specific proposals on tax cuts, defense spending increases, education reform, a prescription drug benefit, and personal accounts for Social Security. Four of those five got enacted despite the lack of a convincing election win and lack of control of the Senate. Sure, compromises were made, but the essential ingredients of each campaign proposal were enacted. In addition, the campaign had produced a detailed agenda on dozens of issues that guided executive branch decision-making in the first term.
By contrast, in 2004 Bush did not run on any specific legislative programs. The issue was staying in Iraq. He received a mandate to do so and carried it out. But Social Security reform was revived as an afterthought in early 2005 and went nowhere. Immigration reform was invented on the fly and died on the vine. There were no significant legislative accomplishments in the second term despite a three million vote win and solid control of both houses of Congress.
Saying what you’re going to do in specific fashion is not only good government, it is also good politics. A solid record of legislative accomplishment gained Republicans seats in 2002 and 2004 and gave Bush a reelection victory despite the Iraq war and a recovering but hardly robust economy. The lack of an agenda in 2005 and 2006 helped cost the Republicans the Congress in the midterms and send the president’s popularity to new depths.
A similar tale can be told of Clinton. The two specific items Bill Clinton ran on in 1992 were a tax increase and ratification of NAFTA, the latter setting him up as a new style of Democrat. Both passed. He also ran on one very nonspecific item: health care reform. The details were left vague for reasons of political expediency. It was widely perceived in the press that Clinton had won a mandate for reform, but the absence of details on which he could claim a mandate doomed the process. What we now remember as HillaryCare collapsed despite solid majorities for the Democrats in both houses of Congress.
Specificity is not only good government and good politics, it is the only way to run a government. The new president and his appointees will not have time to thrash out details after January 20. They will be far too busy just governing. As busy as a presidential campaign may seem, it only gets worse after you are elected. Develop specifics now, gentlemen, or expect either no program or a highly flawed one to be your legacy.
The second item the candidates can control to some extent is personnel. This does not mean handing out cabinet posts, as the popular imagination would have it. It means deciding who speaks authoritatively for the president-want-to-be. Neither a candidate nor a president can possibly have detailed knowledge of all the things about which he is expected to hold an opinion. Nor frankly could a press secretary. There are a whole host of economic, foreign policy, and legal and domestic policy matters that someone should be able to discuss on a detailed background level with the more expert parts of the media, business, and foreign policy establishments. Communication is essential to governing. Done right, it also creates the impression of a government in waiting.
Neither Obama nor McCain has had any success in this regard. Both campaigns resemble senatorial offices with plenty of “aides” with whom one can speak, but no single person except for the senator who can actually provide an authoritative answer.
Finally, both candidates should realize that their current behavior is shaping the foreign policy crises they will confront in their first year as president. The transition period is always a period of opportunity for adversaries. This would be especially the case for President Obama whose post-superpower One World image is sure to be tested. The most prominent flaps of his campaign (besides Reverend Jeremiah Wright) have involved spokesmen whispering to foreigners out of school. One was to tell the Canadians that Obama’s anti-trade rhetoric was for domestic consumption. The other involved a signal that Obama really does plan to stay in Iraq and knows the consequences of a pullout. Indeed a pro-American Arab ambassador told me specifically that the Obama campaign had made the same Iraqi assurances to him.
This suggests that an Obama administration is an accident waiting to happen. If Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chávez, and Kim Jong-Il are watching Obama’s public statements on CNN and preparing for their face-to-face meetings in the Oval Office, but their neighbors who are our allies are being told something else, then conflict caused by miscalculation is inevitable.
McCain’s tough guy image creates less opportunity for miscalculation, but does invite mischief. On a recent trip to Japan, I was struck by the widespread view that China will become far more assertive late this year and early next as both America and Japan go through political transitions. Even the son of the former commander of the Pacific Fleet is going to be tested by the Chinese to see how far he is prepared to go to defend America’s dominance in the region, and there will be no better time to do it than when he is still settling in.
To be fair, our electoral process does not make it easy for candidates to act like grown-ups. Pandering and endless talk about really trivial issues is what both the media and the public expect. That is why candidates must go out of their way to plan ahead: create detailed agendas that provide clarity about legislative intentions, designate spokesmen who can gather information and lay the groundwork for governing and quietly clarify the ambiguities the candidate creates, and recognize that the things you say now about foreign policy matters are driving policy decisions in capitals around the world. Gentlemen, in eight months one of you will no longer be a senator but the leader of the free world. Act like it.
Lawrence B. Lindsey is the author of What a President Should Know . . . but Most Learn Too Late (Rowman and Littlefield).
