Al Hunt on The Economic Team

Al Hunt at Bloomberg looks at the Obama economic team and sees some of the features of a gaggle of unherded cats. He might be right, although like Bruce Bartlett, I am willing to wait and see what the budget looks like next month. In any case, there is a useful background point here: presidents are judged, and rightly so, on their ability to orchestrate staff. And the more thoroughbreds, the more difficult the organization.

So Doris Kearns Goodwin never ceases to tell us about Lincoln and his (boy am I tired of this phrase) Team of Rivals. Goodwin's is not a bad point although I think it may be vastly overblown for promotional purposes, insofar as there really wasn't that much for most of the cabinet to do during the Civil War except to stay the hell out of the President's way. A more interesting example might be Herbert Asquith, Lord Asquith, prime minister of Great Britain from 1908 until he was shuffled aside in 1916. Asquith presided over a cabinet with talents like Winston Churchill and Lloyd George--and others of perhaps equal or greater ability, if not to prickly and self-possessed. Asquith himself sometimes seemed to do nothing at all--but that may be precisely the point, as his ability to command such a motley army may be the real testimony to his success.

A case that has long fascinated me is Dwight Eisenhower, who gets pretty good marks as a president, though he led a cabinet peopled by primitives like George M. Humphrey, Ezra Taft Benson and "Engine Charlie" Wilson, and the gasbag di tutti gasbags, John Foster Dulles. Surprisingly little blame for his underlings adheres to Eisenhower himself, except for the suggestion that it was they, not he, who were the real culprits. This smacks of "If only the Tsar knew!"--a deft achievement at fobbing blame off on others while keeping the credit for one's self.

Other cases are more complicated. Nobody was freer than Ronald Reagan at ceding control to his underlings, yet he seems to have done it in an organized manner. When his deputy was the ham-handed Don Regan, he found himself in trouble; with the deft James Baker, he rode high. Richard Nixon staked a lot on his relationship with Henry Kissinger--or was it the other way around? There's a certain amount of bleak amusement in the degree to which others, particularly Secretary of State William Rogers, found themselves frozen out in the process.

Churchill as an underling is one story; Churchill in power is quite another. Yes, he dominated the execution of the war--but he left virtually all of the running of the country to his cabinet-mates from the labour party, under Clement Atlee. And a splendid job of it they did, too, organized, cooperative and efficient, proving that they could govern well enough that they shunted Churchill aside in 1945 (somewhat the same way, perhaps, that Lloyd George shunted Asquith aside in 1916).

The most dispiriting modern example is perhaps (he keeps coming up) Jimmy Carter, who never seemed to be able to get control of the rivarly of his secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, and his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. That's certainly not an example Obama wants to emulate.