Living With a Difficult Transition

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 25, 2000 | by Michael Rust

The transition from one presidential administration to the next has never been easy, but the transition from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush could be extra difficult.

In his 1981 book Presidential Saints and Sinners, historian Thomas Bailey described the 1876 presidential election in Florida, South Carolina and Louisiana as featuring "gross irregularities on both sides, including bribery, forgery, ballot-box stuffing, intimidation, shootings and outright murder." It makes our own era of dimpled chads and misguided exit polls seem positively benign. Indeed, presidential transitions have occurred during controversial elections, such as 1876, and in times of genuine national crisis that threatened to tear the nation apart. Sometimes the awkward interval between election and inauguration has been a time of contention and controversy, and other times one of celebration and consolidation. But it never as been especially easy, and in modern times it seldom has been really completed.

"I think the first thing that needs to be established is that there is no transition," John Robert Greene, a professor of history and communications at Cazenovia College in New York, tells Insight. And, he adds, this is not because the federal government has yet to start picking up the tab for George W. Bush's efforts to form a government. Until Bush's team and the Clinton White House start working together directly, there can be no real transition process, but this doesn't mean that the GOP team is at the mercy of events. In fact, far from it.

Richard Cheney, Bush's running mate, is heading the new Bush transition team. Nearly 25 years ago he was chief of staff to Gerald Ford when Ford took over from Richard Nixon and later when the defeated Ford passed the White House to Jimmy Carter. Presuming Bush does become president, Cheney's leadership of the transition team is a first. "The vice president has never had this kind of role in transition before," says Greene. Also, former transportation secretary Andrew Card, tapped by Bush to be the new White House chief of staff, played key roles in the elder George Bush's transitions in and out of the Oval Office. And this gives Dubya's group an advantage.

"The link to the Ford White House is very interesting, because there was no transition there either," says Greene, author of The Presidency of Gerald Ford and The Presidency of George Bush. "These are people who lived in a two-and-a-half-year bunker because they didn't have a transition. That was their seminal experience. It was for Bush One and it's going to be for Bush Two."

Even under much happier circumstances than this year's electoral long count, the transition from one administration to the next is a complicated business, filled with contention and controversy, as well as consolidation and celebration. Indeed, long before dimpled chads imposed themselves on the national consciousness, transitions could be trouble. Transitions have occurred in times of national crisis, such as secession in 1860-61 and the Great Depression in 1932-33. They also have occurred after elections as controversial as the one just completed.

In the early days of the republic, an even longer period for transition -- until March 4 -- allowed the Electoral College time to gather, vote and send the results to Washington. The incoming president also needed time to fight his way through the winter elements via horse and coach, or later by rail, to take up his duties in the nation's capital. The first time the White House in Washington changed hands, Thomas Jefferson traveled from his estate at Monticello to Washington by horseback. It took him four days.

Times changed, and so did the amount of time needed to reach the nation's capital. This received official recognition in 1932 with the adoption of the 20th Amendment, which moved the inaugural date up to Jan. 20. Quadrennial grousing from a handful of political scientists that even this was too long screeched to a sudden halt this year as the country spent weeks wondering who the new president would be.

The delay obviously made things more difficult. "I remember [Ronald] Reagan had all kinds of trouble assembling his team," notes the University of Alabama's Forrest McDonald, author of The American Presidency. "It was too short a period then, and now they've lost three weeks." Indeed, McDonald points out that "it takes some people three years to get security clearances" to work for the executive branch.

But the drawn-out nature of assembling an administration may, paradoxically, lower the importance of this year's late start. "The American public is living in a fantasyland if they think that transitions accomplish all the hirings that are necessary in the executive branch" says Greene. "It was never fully accomplished in either the Bush or the Clinton administrations." George W. Bush's argument that the abbreviated transition was another reason for Vice President Al Gore to concede the disputed election may have been a useful rhetorical device but has little grounds in reality, Greene adds.