Out of Control

This summer, writing in Rolling Stone, Reid Cherlin, a former spokesman for President Obama, explored the reasons for the president’s uncomfortable, adversarial relationship with the media. In the process, he illuminated an ongoing issue for the administration: Even in Obama’s second term, it’s clear that he and his team are having a difficult time making the transition from campaigning to governing. 

Cherlin recalled the wisdom of a veteran staffer on the first campaign he worked on: “Just remember, your worst day on the campaign is better than your best day in the White House.” That, said Cherlin, turned out to be not much of an exaggeration.

“The president is nominally in charge of so much that it often feels like the power dynamic inverts, and that the White House exists to take blame for the misdeeds of others—very often agencies or bureaucrats over which you have essentially zero control,” Cherlin wrote. 

“Zero control”? It’s true that the federal government is a massive, incredibly complex enterprise that extends into myriad aspects of Americans’ lives. But a president has much more than “zero control” over the agencies he leads. It’s how he or she chooses to exercise that control that counts.

Obama has a tendency to characterize management failures—from the HealthCare.gov rollout to political targeting at the IRS—as things that are happening to him, not efforts for which he and his lieutenants ultimately bear responsibility. To a certain degree, that’s acceptable in a first term, as an administration adjusts to governing. But in a second term, Americans have a right to expect the basic machinery of government to function well. 

The president obviously is not directly responsible for the day-to-day management of federal agencies. But the president is responsible for setting up a structure in which appropriate decisions are made and carried out. Mostly, this is a matter of devoting time and attention to management. That means setting clear priorities, requiring those down the chain of command to establish appropriate goals for reaching them, and evaluating their progress.

The interesting thing is that the Obama administration has done just that in its management initiative, setting “high priority performance goals,” designating agencies and people to work together on them, and measuring progress. In our cover story this month,
Kellie Lunney reports on one such endeavor, aimed at reducing the rate of violent crime on Indian reservations. 

The good news is the administration exceeded its targets for cutting the crime rate in the short term. The more complicated news is that it’s much trickier to sustain such achievements over time. Management of government is a long, hard slog—and even when you do it well, accolades are hard to come by.

That’s why the best of times in the White House may indeed be worse than the darkest hour of a political campaign.