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There’s an old adage about the importance of decisiveness in a crisis: one bad general is better than two good generals. Barack Obama was implicitly referring to this when he said that the US has only one president at any time. But the problem with the long presidential transition is that there could be no de facto president as the outgoing president’s authority diminishes while the president-elect has not yet taken power.

In the economic crisis we are now experiencing, as Paul Krugman pointed out in his column last Friday, a prolonged power vacuum – and nine weeks is a long time – could be disastrous. Failure by government to avert bankruptcies of major firms could have dire long-lasting consequences.

President-elect Obama’s announcement of a major economic stimulus package on YouTube last Saturday (another first in his use of new media) and his presentation of the economic team on Monday are important steps to show the directions economic policy will take after January 20. In addition, having the new team in place now will give the current team someone to go to shape the response to any breaking crises over the next nine weeks.

(While President-elect Obama was doing the important work, President Bush was “busy” representing the US at the APEC Summit, in which member nations resolved not to erect trade barriers for the next twelve months. Free trade in our time?)

The fundamental question this year’s awkward transition brings to mind is how it could be done better. New York Times columnist Gail Collins suggested last Saturday that Bush and Cheney resign immediately, to be replaced by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi as President until January 20. She could then defer to Obama until he officially takes office. That occurred to me a month ago, and indeed I thought of posting right after the election under the title “why Bush and Cheney should resign immediately,” but rejected it as a bit too fanciful. Well maybe it’s not.

Here are two suggestions for the future. There is currently a lame duck Congress in place, in which some of the legislators making key decisions about the economic crisis are people whom the voters have just repudiated. By what right? The logic of democratic legitimacy dictates that the new Congress take office as soon as it is elected, rather than in early January. I’m not a constitutional lawyer, but it doesn’t seem to me this would require an amendment.

Second, instead of a fixed inauguration day of January 20, have an inauguration period, say from December 1 to January 20, with the choice of an exact day at the discretion of the President-elect. If s(he) believes the nation is in crisis and has a team in place, then s(he) can take the oath of office early in the period and get started. Taking office early would mean less elaborate inaugural festivities, which would certainly be in keeping with the times. This change would require a constitutional amendment, no easy thing. But this year is showing us that the presidential transition process is broken, and Americans should be devoting serious thought to fixing it.

The question everyone was asking about the Obama’s online campaign is what happens when he is elected? What happens to his online army of a million or more? Change.gov, the new and unprecedented website of the office of the President-elect, begins to answer that question. The domain name tells us that this is an official US government website, rather than a candidate website. My hunch is that no previous president-elect in the Internet age established an official website, but then no previous candidate put comparable emphasis on his online campaign.

Change.gov still has some of the look and feel of the Obama campaign website. It includes a full agenda of the reforms Obama plans to introduce (though according to news reports the agenda mysteriously disappeared during the weekend of November 8-9, but has now re-appeared). It contains videos of the latest Obama speeches, as well as videos of people playing major roles in the transition and the new administration. Under the rubric “America Serves,” it mentions Obama’s plans to establish service organizations in education, health care, energy independence, and support for veterans, as well as a proposed educational tax credit for college students.

Like the campaign, the site invites involvement. It provides forms for people to indicate their interest in service or in applying for political appointments. It also encourages people to share their stories and their visions. I would expect the Obama campaign is getting a lot of helpful feedback from the site, but none of it has yet been posted, and I don’t know if the campaign has any intention of posting any of what it receives.

Quite literally as I was writing this post, I received an email from the Obama campaign asking me to complete a survey about experience as a volunteer and interest in volunteering in the future. (Personal disclosure: I signed up some months ago on www.mybarackobama.com not to volunteer but simply to observe the operation.)

I also had a look at www.whitehouse.gov, the official site of the President. Under George Bush this site is completely out-of-date. It’s primarily small-print text, with a little bit of video, and little apparent interest in feedback. Obviously, when Obama takes office on January 20 next year, www.whitehouse.gov will have major changes. The question I’ll close with is how much opportunity Obama’s White House site will provide for citizen input. Will the input simply be in the form of one-way feedback, or will the site permit feedback to be visible in some way, therefore encouraging dialogue among citizens?

Last weekend, I participated in an extraordinary academic gathering in Ottawa, a conference to honour Carleton University public administration professor Bruce Doern on his retirement. In his prolific writings, he has developed what could be referred to in brief as the 5i theory of public policy, namely interplay among institutions, interests, ideas, and individuals. Doern was also recognized as a builder, playing a key role in establishing Carleton University’s School of Public Administration and establishing the annual review How Ottawa Spends.

One of the topics discussed was policy instruments, and in this context Michael Prince examined the use of exhortation. Prince’s University of Victoria colleague David Good suggested a new annual review: How Ottawa Talks. Picking up the point, a participant from the federal government’s Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions described the federal government’s response to the credit crisis as mainly talk and messaging. This is not intended as criticism, but rather a recognition that Canada’s major financial institutions are in much better shape than those in the US and Europe.

Continuing this line of thought, here are three propositions about Talk Politics.
First, the Internet has become the agora, the meeting place, where a great deal of talk politics happens. While governments have access to the mainstream media (e.g. press conferences) their press releases and documents are all, in the first instance, posted on line. For civil society, particularly individuals, participating in talk politics the Internet is the place because it is accessible and inexpensive, and has the possibility of getting responses.

Second, there are many different kinds of political talk. Governments particularly use the “you do the math” approach, appeals to financial self-interest, often accompanied by online calculators. Examples would be tax cuts or energy conservation programs. There may also appeal to voters’ interest in future generations, the world our children will inherit. I’m surprised that governments don’t use this approach more often, given their acknowledged role as representative of the interests of future generations. Individuals’ political talk is often sending an emotional message (Will I Am’s “Yes we can”) or a satirical one (Michel Rivard’s “culture en peril” or Sarah Silverman’s “great schlep”).

The third proposition is that if political talk is just talk it fails, because talk is intended to lead to people taking action. The action might be voting one way or another. Or in the case of public sector messaging about financial institutions, the intention is to discourage investors from panicking in ways that strain the financial system.

Yes, this is an area ripe for research, and one of the real payoffs of this conference would be if it leads to more thinking about this unexplored side of public administration.

On this Remembrance Day, two episodes come to mind. I made my donation to receive a poppy and the elderly veteran who pinned it on my collar thanked me. We should be thanking him for what he did for us.

At the request of one of my students, I ended today’s class at 10:45, rather than 11, so we could attend the Remembrance Day ceremony at UTSC. We spent the class discussing Errol Morris’s brilliant documentary The Fog of War, which focuses on Robert McNamara’s ambivalent reflections about the Vietnam War and, as Secretary of Defense at the time, his responsibility for it. After a morning of sitting and thinking and talking about war, it was appropriate to stand silently to pay our respects to those who fell.

Looking back the morning after on Obama’s smashing election victory, I think it is clearly a result of a number of conditions, each one of which was necessary but not sufficient. It was only the entire set that was sufficient:

• In Barack Obama a superb orator and leader,

• A Republican ticket that combined two shallow candidates, one unstable (McCain) and the other inept (Palin),

• A wildly unpopular Republican incumbent,

• The perfect storm of the economic crisis during the campaign itself,

• The powerfully innovative use of web technology by the Obama campaign to mobilize its supporters, and

• The enthusiasm and energy of Obama’s supporters, particularly young adults.

The Democrats had some of these conditions in recent campaigns but it was only this time that they all came together.

On to the transition. Let’s contrast the situation in the US and in parliamentary democracies. I am reminded of the moment in 1940 in a confidence vote concerning Prime Minister Chamberlain’s handling of the war when Conservative backbencher Leo Amery quoted Oliver Cromwell’s dismissal of the Long Parliament to devastating effect: “You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing! Depart, I say, and let us have done with you! In the name of God, go!” In a parliamentary system, George Bush would have heard these words years ago, and would have been long gone.

The transition in the UK is brutally short, with a defeated PM leaving 10 Downing Street the next day. In Canada, it takes a little longer – two or three weeks — given the need to choose a cabinet and assemble the political staff of the PMO and ministers. The long transition in the US was originally based on an estimate of the time it would take a winning candidate to pack up his household and journey to Washington. The justification for the long transition now is because of the large number of political appointments the President must make.

In normal times, the machinery of government grinds slowly during the transition, with the President trying for a last time to assert his agenda through executive decisions – likely to be reversed by his successor – and planning his last minute pardons (Conrad Black perhaps?). These are not normal times, however, as evidenced by the global economic summit to be held in Washington on November 15. Clearly the most influential American voice at the summit will be that of President-elect Obama. If the constitution makes it impossible for Bush to go immediately, then the best he can do for his nation and the world at the summit is to take on the role of butler, waiting in the background and not speaking. And let’s hope that in the ten weeks of transition – having lost the confidence of the American people – he attempts to do little and quickly fades out of sight.