The powers that shouldn't be; five Washington insiders the next Democratic president shouldn't hire.

• Author: Glastris, Paul

The Powers that Shouldn't Be

Given he was garnering about 2 percent in national polls, it may have seemed a bit premature for former Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt to have started naming possible cabinet appointments last July. During a Democratic candidates deate in Houston, Babbitt decided that for his quest to be taken seriously, it might help to drop some serious names. So right then, only 480 shopping days before the election, he rattled off a list of Washington's finest, including Robert "Mr. Democrat' Strauss and Warren Christopher, Jimmy Carter's deputy secretary of state and a certified member of the foreign policy establishment. Babbitt's press secretary, Mike McCurry, explains the Christopher choice: "It was a way of communicating to inside the Beltway. Hey, I have some sense of how things move in Washington, I'm no hick governor with straw coming out of my ears.''

Babbitt inadvertently let the TV audience in on what political junkies have been all too aware of: the other campaign, the one for federal jobs. It's already well under way. Candidates are trying to attract big-name advisers and, just as important, would-be appointees have begun campaigning aggressively for post-season jobs. Like the unknown governor yearning for the presidency, the aspiring cabinet secretary must start early if he or she wants to stand out.

When Gary Hart was the front-runner, the seekers clamored to get close to his senior aides. "As the Hart campaign was warming up there were people trying to elbow their way in, some with very sharp elbows,' Richard E. Feinberg, a foreign policy adviser to Hart, told The New York Times. Hart's exit affected this other campaign as much as it did the one for the nomination. Now the seekers have spread out. Super-lobbyist Anne Wexler is a top adviser to Michael Dukakis, James Schlesinger is whispering in Richard Gephardt's ear, Robert Strauss is simply everywhere, and hundreds of lesser knowns have fanned out to the candidates of their choice. "How do people do it?' said Feinberg. "By ingratiating themselves with senior advisers, by writing unsolicited memoranda, providing either advice on campaigning or specific issues, by offering to organize a briefing session on a subject.' Or they pound out opinion pieces, angle for a few precious minutes on "Nightline,' or attend conferences. Lots of them. The conferences of choice this year have been those of the Washington-based Center for National Policy. The Center has become a sort of employment agency for the government-in-waiting, just as the Trilateral Commission and the Industrial Policy Study Group were in previous elections.

Insiders know the they'd better campaign now because competition becomes frenzied during the ten-week transition period after the election. The clawing and climbing of job seekers has been so frenetic during past transitions as to evoke Stephen King descriptions from officials involved: "a black morass,' "a whirlwind,' "thunder clouds and lightning,' "that tidal wave,' "that avalanche, that onslaught.'

Presidents, in part to avoid the stampede, often choose people they know and trust, a formula that can backfire in the form of a Bert Lance or Frank Moore. Although less known than Lance, Moore was perhaps more damaging. Carter put him in charge of the White House congressional liaison office because Moore had done such a fine job lobbying the Georgia legislature when Carter was governor. But Moore was as much of a Washington neophyte as Carter; many of the administration's legislative initiatives stumbled over Moore's inexperience--"as disaster' is how one top Carter aide describes Moore's tenure aide describes Moore's tenure.

Presidents will also make cabinet-level selections that satisfy the demands of the department's constituencies. Reagan selected James Watt to be secretary of interior to please Western politicians like Senator Alan Simpson and Western business interests like the National Coal Association, whose president bubbled at the time, "We're deliriously happy.' (Reagan, who at first shared the sentiment, eventually stopped smiling when Watt became the administration's chief liability.)

To dispel the impression they'd make appointments of the caliber of Lance, Moore, or Watt, candidates have made an equally perilous mistake: relying on respectable Washington insiders.

There are, of course, some talented people in Washington institutions like Congress, the thinktanks and law firms. But too often they have investments in the same failed policies that new administrations are supposedly elected to overturn. Outsiders might lack government experience, but insiders are more likely to be blind to ideas percolating in the rest of the country. Take Carter's appointment of Joseph Califano, a veteran bureaucrat of the Kennedy-Johnson years, as his secretary of health, education and welfare. When Carter's Labor Department tried pushing a welfare reform program tied to a work requirement, Califano argued that people on welfare were "functionally illiterate unemployables.' Carter pointed out that he had plenty of capable employees on his farm who could operate forklifts but couldn't sign their names--just the sort of common sense you're more likely to pick up on a peanut farm than on the banks of the Potomac. Califano continued to advocate that old liberal warhorse, a guaranteed national income, which doomed the welfare reform initiative Carter had made such a high priority.

Finally, there is the danger that in the quest for someone with an impressive resume who knows how Washington works, a president overlooks obvious faults he wouldn't tolerate from some no-name, such as, say, being a complete jerk. James Schlesinger impressed candidate Jimmy Carter with his brains, his high-level experience (he'd run the CIA, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Defense Department), and with secrets regarding the defense spending vacillations of his old boss, Gerald Ford, just in time for the presidential debates. After the election, Carter hired Schlesinger as energy secretary. But Carter fired Schlesinger in 1979 in part for the same reason Gerald Ford had--he was unbearably arrogant and impatient with lesser minds who disagreed with him, and hence inept at dealing with Congress.

Similar disasters lurk among the respectable candidates for appointment in a new Democratic administration. Each of the five people on our list represents a tendency of establishment Washington that a Democratic president would have to challenge if he or she hopes to govern well enough to win reelection in '92. Several have an additional liability: character flaws that might not hamper their ability to win a seat at the cabinet table but, once there, could prove damaging to their president. All have some fine qualities, and after eight years of watching conservative rockheads in top federal jobs, almost any Democrat is going to seem refreshing. But that's hardly an argument for giving them some of the most important jobs in America.

It may seem a little early to be sorting resumes for a Democratic cabinet a year before the party has even chosen a nominee, let alone taken the White House. But by next fall it will be too late; when "that avalanche, that onslaught' comes, the harried president-elect will start turning to those people who helped him early in the campaign. With each passing day, these troublesome courtiers are winning valuable brownie points. Putting a few establishment resumes in the "reject' pile right now might be the next step towards making the Democratic party something the nation can be proud of.

Patrick Caddell

To understand what's wrong with Pat Caddell, take a sip of New Coke and then a sip of Classic Coke. If you're like me, you'll wonder how on earth Coca-Cola thought changing the formula was a great new idea. Yet it makes perfect sense that Caddell was a marketing consultant on the New Coke campaign. It was, after all, new. A change. And Caddell is the official strategist/ pollster/Svengali of those on-the-move-and-lookin'-for-a-change baby boomers. "Coke was very receptive,' Scott Miller, Caddell's partner on the Coke contract, told The Wall Street Journal before the product bombed. "It's ironic that Pat and I have been beating our heads against the wall for the last two years with the Democratic party to get them to embrace change, and then go to corporate America and it accepts our concepts.' The people at Pepsi must have delighted in that irony, and in the long run, if Pat Caddell is influential, the Republicans will...