Jan 4th 2001 | WASHINGTON, DC >From The Economist print edition The mandate-less manner of George Bushs victory led many people to expect that his cabinet would be strongly bipartisan, and weakly conservative. His appointments have proved their prediction wrong Making his mark ON THE face of it, George Bushs administration seems designed largely to compensate for his personal lack of experience in government. Think of his proposed cabinet as three concentric circles: an inner core of heavyweight national security and economic policymakers; a conservative second ring of domestic policymakers; and a motley crew at the outskirts. For the inner circle, Mr Bush reached back to the Ford administration, and to his fathers. Three members of this group served under President Ford a quarter-century ago: Dick Cheney, then chief of staff; Paul ONeill, then deputy head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), now nominated as Treasury secretary; and Donald Rumsfeld, the once and future defence secretary. This group gives the Bush cabinet a strong corporate and managerial flavour, as if it were a meeting of Americas board of directors. All three served at the pinnacles of the old economy. Mr Cheney ran Halliburton, an oil-services company. Mr ONeill ran Alcoa, a virtual aluminium monopoly. Mr Rumsfeld came from G.D. Searle, a pharmaceuticals firm (a background shared with the new head of the OMB, Mitch Daniels, who comes from Eli Lilly, another drugs firm). These men exemplify Main Street Republicanism. Ronald Reagan surrounded himself with swashbuckling Californian businessmen with ill-concealed contempt for the east-coast establishment. Now, the fiscal conservatives of the east coast have come out on top. With the exception of Larry Lindsay, a former Fed governor and now chief economic adviser to Mr Bush, there is hardly a supply-sider in the bunch. If you then add in the other members of the national-security team from the White House of the elder BushColin Powell and Condoleezza Riceyou complete a picture of the inner core as a collective safe pair of hands. Their main drawback may be that they will tend to see foreign crises in predominantly military terms (Messrs Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell all have backgrounds in the Pentagon). But they are undoctrinaire, unflamboyant, and experienced at managing big organisations. These are not negligible qualities. Bill Clintons policy-wonkish preferences plunged his first year in government into organisational chaos. The Bush teams depth of managerial expertise has been rightly praised. Leon Panetta, whom Mr Clinton brought in as chief of staff to sort out the early muddle, called the first choices pragmatic moderates and said it bodes well for the effort to try to govern at the centre. That may be true of the inner circle, but it can hardly be said about the next ring, that of the main domestic policymakers. This contains more conservative figures. The proposed secretary of health and human services, Tommy Thompson, is the governor who shook up welfare in Wisconsin. Linda Chavez is one of the few Reaganites in the new administration (she was head of the Commission on Civil Rights then), and her nomination as labour secretary has already drawn the ire of trade unions. Spencer Abraham, a former senator, has been nominated to run a department (energy) that he once proposed abolishing. Above all, the appointments of attorney-general (John Ashcroft) and interior secretary (Gale Norton) have been seen as victories for the right. These figures are heroes to conservatives for their espousal of policies that are meat and drink to the right, especially abortion. But in fact, though they can all be lumped together under the broad rubric of conservative, there is a critical difference between them. Norm Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (where Messrs Cheney and ONeill have both worked), puts it this way. As governor of Wisconsin, which voted for Al Gore and Mr Clinton twice, Mr Thompson has had to work with Democrats to achieve anything. It is hard to imagine him coming into office and reversing everything his predecessor didespecially since that predecessor, Donna Shalala, also comes from Wisconsin and worked with Mr Thompson when she was chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Leading with the right But with Mr Ashcroft, Mrs Norton and Mrs Chavez, it is easy to think they would indeed overturn the bits of the Clinton legacy they inherit. The current interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt, has set aside more land under federal programmes to protect wilderness areas than anyone since Teddy Roosevelt. Mrs Norton is a fierce opponent of the extension of these programmes and a supporter of private land-use rights in the west. Mr Clinton has supported affirmative-action policies in labour law and tried to narrow the gap between mens and womens pay for the same work. Mrs Chavez is an outspoken opponent of both ideas. As for Mr Ashcroft, he is one of the most successful of all politicians from the religious right (he wants, for example, to make abortion illegal in the case of rape). With the office of the attorney-general supervising everything from antitrust to the protection of abortion clinics and the laws governing the public activities of churches, it is possible to imagine him rolling back almost everything Janet Reno has done. In short, Mr Bushs cabinet includes both confrontational and co-operative conservatives. If you then consider that the outer circle of cabinet members includes a pro-choice Republican (Christine Todd Whitman) and a Democrat (Norman Mineta), it is clear that ideological coherence is not Mr Bushs primary concern. His team is conservative, but not doctrinaire. Rather, Mr Bush is choosing horses for courses. On the campaign trail, he promised to build a national defensive shield against missiles. In Mr Rumsfeld, he chose one of the countrys foremost proponents of that system, which grew partly out of the alarming findings of the Rumsfeld commission into the threats of rogue states. On the trail, Mr Bush promised education reform that gave weight to academic testing and holding schools accountable for measured performance, rather than school vouchers. In Rod Paige, the proposed education secretary, he chose a man who implemented measures just like that as head of the Houston school board. One lesson of the new administration is that it makes sense to take Mr Bushs campaign promises seriously. The other lesson concerns Mr Bushs own role. It has been widely thought that by appointing heavyweights like Messrs Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell, Mr Bush would let them do much of his job and recede into the background. This is partly right. Mr Bushs choices do indeed look like the political implementation of Peter Druckers theory of management by objectives: set broad goals, delegate, dont micro-manage, and fire the failures. Newt Gingrich loved to talk about applying Mr Druckers ideas to politics. Mr Bush is actually doing it. What is misleading is the idea that Mr Bush will be able to recede into the background. Having surrounded himself with powerful figures, he will face the prospect of making tough decisions when the ambitions of his heavyweights clash, or if their cherished schemes cannot get through Congress. In choosing Mr Rumsfeld over the favourite for defence, Dan Coats (for fear that Mr Coats would not stand up to General Powell or to the Pentagon bureaucracy), Mr Bush showed he is capable of not taking the easy way out. He will need more such determination. Far from being a reason for receding into the background, his penchant for delegating to strong figures will be a test of, not a substitute for, his own political skills. _______________________________________________ Crashlist website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
