VP Brainstorms

This is what I've been doing today.


I don't know if it gets me any closer to my proposal, but I like using different colored markers.

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NY Times reports Biden wins Iraq

The New York Times reports that the drawdown in Afghanistan shows Biden's increased influence in the White House, it also mentions that Biden is a fierce advocate for the President's priorities (as though the VP has any choice).

Biden's influence is not news, there were some stronger bits of evidence, for example the Vice President's schedule which in a typical week shows numerous high-level meetings both with the President and key officials or, perhaps most significantly, the West Wing floor plan.

I still think what is striking about the policy process around Afghanistan is the way Biden played a public "devil's advocate" role when the traditional VP role has been to exercise influence quietly.

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Gore: Another Edition of VP vs ex-VP

Answering the Politico Arenaquestion Does Al Gore have a legitimate gripe with Obama? I wrote:

Al Gore is completely right and completely wrong at the same time. He is right that environmental issues have taken a back seat in the Obama administration. With multiple shooting wars, an economy in a continuing state of free-fall, and a hostile House little wonder that Obama is not devoting his time to the issue.

Ironically, Gore was an extremely influential VP in his day. His personal relationship with President Clinton was critical, but so was Gore's knowing which battles to fight. In the Clinton administration economic issues were front and center, everything else was secondary. As VP Gore did not push environmental issues when the president wasn't interested. As an elder statesman Gore is not constrained by political realities.

VP influence has relied on making sure there was limited public space between the views of our government's two principles. The VP has no bureaucratic power base of his own and Presidents don't need freelancers in the White House. But as an ex-VP, the only influence comes from reaching out to the public. One thing that is fascinating as that anyone cares what an ex-VP says. Throttlebottom would be amazed.

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Agnew Reconsidered?

Spiro Agnew is the epitome of the inconsequential VP, who systematically blew whatever opportunities he had to influence policy. Nixon, by some accounts couldn't stand his mere presence. But I am reading Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary - which is really a fun, amusing read. Unsurprising, since Moynihan was a fun, amusing politician.

Moynihan had worked in the Nixon White House, sort of a house intellectual who had seen the collapse of the New Deal Democrats, and had found an intellectual refuge amongst the Republicans. He had some interesting things to say to and about Agnew. He deplored Agnew's aggressive, inflammatory rhetoric - but he seemed to have a certain respect for the man. In this letter to Agnew he wrote:

I have told a dozen colleagues here at Harvard that as a judge of political horseflesh I do not know your equal in American politics today, which is not to say I agree with you about many things, but simply that your judgment about who to have to lunch to talk about the world is in my view pretty damn good. But there are not half a dozen other Republicns who are in any way so disposed and so equipped. You are alone. You have no troops. No one carries on your argument, no one elaborates it, no one initiates comparable and parallel arguments. No journal of any intellectual status is open to your point of view....

If you were to ask my advice it would be this. Cease attacking. Begin talking about the complex problems we must now face... You really can help in this, and I know you would want to do so.

Perhaps just a bit of flattery as Moyhnihan tries to persuade Agnew to tone down his rhetoric? Probably - almost certainly. But now look at this (very lengthy) memo to Ehrichman and Haldeman trying to get the White House to develop a conservative intellectual approach to governance:

....Here permit me a sympathetic word about the Vice President. He alone of administrative spokesmen has sought to take up some of the intellectual issues of the time and to argue the conservative case. But it has been a disaster for the President. Many things the Vice President says are true, at least I would think so. But there does not now exist a spectrum of opinion in which his views are seen to be located in a particular point, a bit to the left of this reasonable person, a bit to the left of that one. Opinion is so concentrated on the liberal left that Agnew's mildly conservative positions are easily portrayed as the voice of the Radical Right. The Vice President has greatly contributed to this by attacking individuals by name. It might be argued that some had it coming to them...but the main point is that the attacks enabled the opposition to the administration to ignore anything of substance he said, and to depict even his most reasoned statements as the frenzied precursors of Fascist Repression....

The Vice President has assembled an advisory group of writers and professors. I have a rough idea of the panel and I would not hesitate to state that for sheer intellectual distinction is head an shoulders above anything any Democratic candidate for President is likely to assemble for similar purposes....

So I am pretty sure that 90% of what Moynihan is writing is an attempt to get Agnew's famously divisive rhetoric toned down. That he throws a fair amount of flattery into the mix is no surprise in the realm of court politics. Moynihan was on to something here. He saw the intellectual collapse of the New Dealers and recognized that a conservative intellectual cadre was needed for the Republicans to displace the Democrats. (This happened, not so much later.) He also recognized that a political spokesman who could articulate complex ideas in simple, popular terms, was needed. (This also happened.) With a bit of seasoning, could Agnew have done it? Was Moynihan trying to both quiet the rhetoric but also initiate a program to "train" Agnew?

Agnew had only been governor of Maryland for two years when Nixon plucked him from relative obscurity and nominated him to the vice presidency. Had he served a bit longer in office, perhaps he would have had a better sense of how to conduct himself. Or, perhaps, Agnew was doing exactly what Nixon wanted as a lightning - that Nixon had no time or inclination for a conservative intellectual project. (He certainly had the brains - Alan Greenspan says Nixon and Clinton were the two smartest presidents he worked with.)

Tough to know - of course Agnew would have been a flawed vessel for any such ambition. He was, as Jimmy Breslin stated, "A magnificent thief," who had payments delivered to the Old Executive Office Building.

Essence of DSK: Do Leaders Matter?

Following the DSK imbroglio, one related story is that during a period of international financial crises the IMF (a critical institution) is leaderless. Of course, they have a deep bench of technocrats to make the trains run on time. On the other hand the present multiple financial meltdowns may be so severe and fundamental that nothing the IMF does would really make a difference – there are grand historical forces at work.

I mention this because a fundamental tenet of bureaucratic politics is that individuals and their preferences matter. If there is a single aspect to that perspective rooted in data rather then anecdote it is the question of “who is in the room.” Does it matter that the IMF doesn’t have a person of top rank to sit in on meetings. There is, of course, a number two but will DSK’s top office effectively respond to the number two’s leadership style?

This could be boiled down to the perspectives offered in the poli-sci classic Essence of Decision.

Model 1 (Rational Actor) vs. Model 2 (Organizational Behavior): Does the IMF matter or are events being shaped by deeper forces?

Model 2 (Organizational Behavior) vs. Model 3 (Governmental Politics): Will the IMF pretty much do its thing regardless of its leadership, or does DSK’s personal influence matter?

Really, my whole point here is best summed up by a far wiser Frenchman then DSK. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote:

I have come across men of letters who have written history without taking part in public affairs, and politicians who have concerned themselves with producing events without thinking about them. I have observed that the first are always inclined to find general causes whereas the second, living in the midst of disconnected daily facts, are prone to imagine that everything is attributable to particular incidents, and that the wires they pull are the same as those that move the world. It is to be presumed that both are equally deceived.

Sidenote, DSK's behavior is one good argument for the VP - someone needs to be available to step into the breach when less appealing aspects of human nature cause top leaders to be unable to attend to their duties.

The Trouble with Czars

In The Wall Street Journal today former Secretary of State, Treasury, Labor (and OMB chief) George Shultz decries the growth of White House staff at the expense of the cabinet.

The practice of appointing White House "czars" to rule over various issues or regions is not a new invention. But centralized management by the White House staff has been greatly increased in recent years.

Beyond constitutional questions, such White House advisers, counselors, staffers and czars are not accountable. They cannot be called to testify under oath, and when Congress asks them to come, they typically plead executive privilege.

The consequences, apart from the matter of legitimate governance, are all too often bad for the formation and execution of policy. The departments, not the White House, have the capacity to carry out policies and they are full of people, whether political appointees or career governmental employees, who have vast experience and much to contribute to the making of ­policy. When White House staffers try to formulate or execute policy, they can easily get off track in a way that would not happen in a regular department.

As secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan, I experienced this with great pain when White House people developed and ran an off-the-books program of arms sales to Iran. It erupted in the Iran-Contra scandal involving the unconstitutional transfer of funds not appropriated by Congress to the Contras, and with close to devastating consequences for the president.

Iran-Contra is a dramatic example, but the more general problem is the inability to take full advantage of available skills and expertise in policy making, and the difficulty in carrying out the functions of government nationally and internationally.

Shultz sees the impossible confirmation process as a primary culprit in this emphasis on White House-based decision-making. The inability to fill critical sub-cabinet ranks quickly makes it impossible for the president to get a firm rein on the bureaucracy. My advisor, Mac Destler, in his Presidents, Bureaucracies, and Foreign Policy discusses the President's need to create centers of strength at various levels throughout the bureaucracy. It is also fair to say that the record of White House czars is not a strong one.

There is other literature that suggests that there are regular patterns to Presidential centralization and dispersion of power. On key issues, the President puts the issue under the White House rubric until he has built the bureaucratic network he needs to further the issue. There is also the issue of scale. Presidents now appoint thousands when they take office. It isn't that these appointees are disloyal, but they probably don't know what the President wants and thus are liable to capture.

None of this is to say that Shultz's argument for easing the appointment process is not a good one - it is! His own record of success as a bureaucratic infighter is impressive (I hope he'll let me interview him when I get to that stage...)

One interesting note to the VP obsessed is that back in the mid-80s when the Reagan Administration couldn't figure out how to manage international terrorism Shultz apparently proposed VP Bush to head a Terrorism Task Force (I wrote a paper on it). Terrorism is THE inter-agency problem and a White House coordination effort was the only way to manage the process. But of course the VP is not a staffer, he (and one day she) is very much a public figure that is ultimately accountable.

Joe's Got no Action

The swirl of world events is incredible. Throughout the Obama administration, VP Biden has been in the center of national security decision-making. He liaised with leaders in Iraq and Egypt at critical junctures. He delivered speeches in Moscow, Beirut and elsewhere. So where is he now?

No court politics here, a review of the Vice President's schedule shows he is in regular meetings with the President and key national security figures - Combatant Commanders, SecDef, and this morning he hosted a meeting with the Secretary of State. But Biden is not taking a public role in explaining administration policy. Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates are, why not?

The VP has NO formal powers (unless specifically delegated by the President.) In upper levels of government, according to the classic Bureaucratic Policies and Foreign Policies a key question is "who has the action?" That is which official in which agency can actually sign off on an initiative. The VP doesn't have it. SecDef and SecState have a formal role in war-fighting and diplomacy. Having the VP out front in place of the President is useful in many situations, but not when forces are actually deployed. It would be Constitutionally and politically problematic to have Biden take a leading role.