The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

By the time Americans pick a new President on Nov. 8 they will have invested nearly half a billion dollars in a random and chaotic process. They will have absorbed encyclopedic detail on such pop issues as the "wimp factor," and probably given more of the public's airwaves to this political marathon than to any other story of our age. Then a lot of them will lose interest until the Inauguration.

The President-elect will face the task of forming a Government, a job infinitely more important than campaigning, but a bit boring. Most of the huge media caravan will go back to covering social and economic battles and natural calamities. Stories on the nightly news will recite unfamiliar names, vague accounts of struggles for favor and repetitive rumors of anointment. There will be no balloons and bands. Constructing a Government is a gritty business.

By all odds, this transition once again will be a shirttail operation, underfunded, ill defined, rushed and harried by spoilsmen and political operatives. Campaigns have become an industry of moneygrubbers and pitchmen, only a few of whom should be allowed into power. The nation and Ronald Reagan might have been better off had 1980 Campaign Director Bill Casey, a renowned Wall Street buccaneer, been left there rather than given the CIA as spoils. Jimmy Carter's sad history might have been different had he kept his campaign strategist Hamilton Jordan out of the White House loop. And John Mitchell, Richard Nixon's campaign head and later Attorney General, was such a misfit in power that he ended up in prison.

Signs of trouble are all around this year, from Bob Dole's hapless finance director, who was dropped amid reports of inside deals, right down to lowly campaign workers who are openly bending the regulations on fund limits. National politics is beset by special interests and schemers who have their own distant agendas and smell position or profits down the corridors of power. How many Bert Lances and Ed Meeses, with their singular financial styles, are circulating now, eager to wield federal authority next year? What often goes on in the political trenches is not acceptable in the calmer climates of government.

Having witnessed the debacle of Watergate from the inside, Henry Kissinger says that a great reform of American Government would be for presidential contenders to assemble two sets of supporters, one to campaign, the other to govern. A complete separation of duties is, of course, neither possible nor desirable; they must be fused at some point. But winning power and wielding power are now so incompatible that some sort of Kissinger formula should be considered.

Some good folks have been stirring on this problem under the guidance of Harvard's Carl Brauer, a student of presidential transitions. He tapped 150 people from the past nine Administrations, Roosevelt to Reagan, to recommend how Presidents should go about getting the right people to serve and stay. Lyndon Johnson's senior appointees hung around only 2.8 years on the average. The Reagan average is down to two years. One-third of all the senior appointees of the past 20 years served a mere 1.5 years or less. Even a casual observer must ask just what they had in mind -- really helping the country, or making important contacts in their search for big quick bucks on the outside.

Among the recommendations of Brauer's group is to allocate $2 million to $3 million by this summer for the transition. Some of the money would go to the major party candidates right after they are nominated, even though one will lose. Such a plan, the instigators believe, would appeal to the contenders as a welcome way to armor themselves against the political pressures that they know will explode with victory. How the winner in November goes about gathering the people who will run this country will tell us more about his prospects for success than all his speeches, promises, polls and campaign prowess.