Keeping Hope Alive

First of all, it must be said that the passage sets up something of a straw man. Mitt Romney didn’t just fall off the political turnip truck. He knows full well that a Democratic congress won’t allow any president to “manage” it, let alone a Republican one. The president, however, is responsible for managing the executive branch, and that’s where competent management would have an enormous impact. The “self-preservation” and “turf protection” that the Journal references are not unique to political institutions. Indeed, they plague every business in our economy larger than a sole proprietorship. For some reason, many media members seem under the impression that every for-profit enterprise is a money-making machine where each employee gladly sacrifices himself for the company’s greater good.

As anyone who’s ever run a company knows, it doesn’t work that way. All but the best employees have “self-preservation” as their primary impulse. As a boss, you know you’ll never have to face the day when an employee comes into your office and says, “You know, I’m not making much of a contribution here, and the company would be better off without me. So even though I have no other job prospects, no looming unemployment benefits, and no likely means of financial sustenance, here’s my resignation.” The “turf-battles” that the Journal references are merely one of the more pernicious manifestations of this self-preservation instinct.

IT’S INTERESTING how so many journalists have such a skewed perspective on private companies. Many commentators and politicians who harbor antipathy to the Romney campaign have pointed out the putative differences between private industry and government agencies. But human nature does not somehow suspend itself in the private sector.

Okay, a lot of media members and politicians have never worked in an organization that seeks profit with the ruthless, single-minded focus that most companies need to have in order to survive. But can’t they at least look around at the companies they know about? Don’t they see unions showing more concern for their members’ “self-preservation” than their employers’ profits?

One of the canards used against the Romney campaign is that “private sector techniques” would never work in government agencies. But successful “private sector techniques” are usually little more than 10 percent vision and 90 percent competent management. If a large for-profit company had a division that went rogue (not to mention incompetent) like the CIA has the past seven years, the Board of Directors would fire the CEO if he failed to either reform that division or euthanize it while handing off its pressing responsibilities to a part of the company that could capably handle them.

What’s most noteworthy regarding the media’s skepticism about bringing private sector principles to the public sector is that the skepticism exists even though no qualified (or even unqualified) person has ever seriously tried to bring private sector principles to the government. The efforts of a 43 year-old lifelong politician like Al Gore to “reinvent government” hardly seem relevant. The last extremely successful businessman who served as president was George Washington. Seriously. And the federal government has grown quite a bit since Washington (competently) ran the show.

The last president who came to office with experience at successfully managing anything other than a miniaturized version of the federal government (i.e. a state government) was Dwight Eisenhower. Interestingly, Eisenhower was the only president in the post New Deal era who seriously grappled with controlling the Executive Branch Leviathan. It’s also worth noting that Eisenhower is probably the last competent manager to occupy the oval office. (As much as we all love Reagan, management really wasn’t his strength).

For those determined to insist that the Executive Branch is a far too unwieldy beast to possibly compare to a private sector concern, here are a couple of things to chew on: Microsoft is universally regarded as a pretty well run company. At the very least, no one says it’s run worse than the typical wing of the Executive Branch. Microsoft has 79,000 employees. Putting aside the Defense Department, the next largest arm of the executive branch, the Department of Veterans Affairs, has 235,000 employees. Homeland Security follows hot on the Veterans Affairs department’s heels with 208,000 staffers. The next biggest agency (Treasury) employs 115,000 workers. None of these are in a completely different weight class than Microsoft, although no one would argue that they’re managed nearly as well.

Here’s perhaps a more inspiring example: WalMart has 1.39 million employees. In spite of its current political football status, WalMart is a brilliantly run organization, and everyone in retail knows it. Most people who shop retail also know it, which is why WalMart is so successful.

WalMart’s sum of 1.39 million domestic employees is more than the total amount of employees in all the departments of the Executive Branch, not including the military. Yes, Virginia, WalMart employs more people than the State Department, Treasury, Homeland Security, Justice and ten other agencies combined.

And yet somehow many consider the goal of competently running the Executive Branch to be a delusional pipe-dream. It’s important to note that the arguments used to dismiss this vision usually rely on cursory statements that show an odd yet persistent ignorance on how the most successful parts of the private sector actually function.

Or, as the Barack Obama campaign would put it, ” Sí se puede!”

Dean Barnett is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.