BRING BACK TANK BOY:

All the President's Men (John Sedgwick, September 5, 2004, Boston Globe Magazine)

Oddly, it's the last vestige of the election spirit from the days of the Founding Fathers, when a candidate for elective office would never do anything so vulgar as actively campaign for the position he craved. Instead, early presidential aspirants copied George Washington's example and merely signaled their availability, leaving it to their friends to do the heavy lifting of getting them elected. So, nowadays, even A-listers like Bill Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, Clinton's Treasury deputy, Roger Altman, and longtime Delaware senator and Kerry confidant Joe Biden breathe nary a word of their future employment objectives, even as they make themselves available to the candidate for lengthy policy briefings. An administration job? It's the last thing on their minds! [...]

The whole mystery is more pertinent than usual because of the fact that, for the first time since that other JFK in 1960, Kerry seeks the job from a perch as a US senator, without any significant executive experience. In a long career in public life, he has never had to staff up before. (Of course, as a senator, he at least knows how the confirmation process works, which might spare him any Zoe Baird-like snafus.) Kerry partisans like US Representative Barney Frank argue that the whole issue of executive experience is overblown -- even if it has congealed into conventional wisdom for more than a generation -- since no route to the White House offers adequate preparation. "There's nothing like being president of the United States," says Frank, who has served in Congress during four presidential administrations. "Nothing." Bill Clinton had been a governor, but of lightly populated, out-of-the-way Arkansas. "What's that?" Frank asks. "A three-day-a-week job?" George W. Bush's Texas, where he was governor for six years, is obviously a more consequential state, but the job of governor there is oddly downsized, giving the incumbent surprisingly little power to assemble his own administration. The agriculture commissioner and state comptroller, for instance, are popularly elected.

TO FRANK, THE WHOLE IDEA OF THE PRESIDENT AS ANY kind of hands-on manager is ridiculous for an entity the size of the United States. "He's not the chief operating officer," Frank says. "He's the policy guy, the one who mobilizes policy." That's why Reagan, who forgot the names of some of his Cabinet members, could still be effective. Still, Kerry's entire top staff now numbers only seven, nowhere near enough even to fill out the top ranks at the Department of Labor.

Plus, there is that aloof thing with Kerry. In caricature, at least, he is the friendless iconoclast, snowboarding alone. But intimates insist that this is a wild misconception. "He has a huge national Rolodex," says Vallely, and one that is, of necessity, based far more in Washington than in Boston. He ticks off the places from which Kerry would likely draw talent: the Council on Foreign Relations, the Rand Corporation, the Brookings Institution, "where Teresa is a board member," he notes, referring to Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry. To Vallely, John Kerry's job in the federal government reflects a largeness to his thinking that contrasts with the more parochial concerns of governors. "Dukakis mastered the Massachusetts government," Vallely says. "But he viewed the United States as 50 states. I think Kerry starts with the world and then thinks of the United States' place in it."

Crimminy, he really is worse than Dukakis. Strangely enough, George Bush starts with America.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 5, 2004 11:23 PM