Managing the Oval Office

OPINION

By DAVID ROTHKOPF
Published: January 19, 2013

Mark Ulriksen


BARACK OBAMA’s critics and supporters tend to agree: the first four years of the Obama administration have included plenty of disappointment and frustration.

Some of the that can be attributed to inherited challenges like the financial crisis. Some were caused by unexpected developments overseas. Some are the result of a dysfunctional Congress better known for logjams, corruption and ideological intransigence than action. (So much so that a recent poll showed that Americans like Congress less than cockroaches, colonoscopies and root canals.)

But Mr. Obama and his team would benefit, as they begin the second term, by acknowledging that many of the biggest problems facing the administration flow directly from the man at the top. Mr. Obama is a lousy manager. As chief executive he gets a C — and then only if graded on a curve that takes into account his predecessor’s managerial weaknesses.

For all of the notable achievements of Mr. Obama’s first term — getting troops out of Iraq, passing health care and financial services reform, signing legislation that guarantees that women get equal pay for equal work, removing Osama bin Laden — many of the administration’s shortcomings are traceable, at least in part, to troubles connected to the way Mr. Obama has chosen to run the government.

The administration has not done a good job of delegating to and empowering cabinet officials. Nor does it seem to have built necessary teams and coalitions or anticipated and planned for likely challenges. The Obama team’s failure to make the most of stimulus funding, to make progress on climate change, to react swiftly to international crises in Egypt, Libya and Syria, and to maintain good relations with allies on Capitol Hill and beyond stem from lack of managerial skill.

A predicate problem is that the president’s team has focused so intently on presenting Mr. Obama’s strengths that they, like many senior managers, seem to have begun to believe their own news releases.

Consider what is, perhaps, the iconic image of the Obama presidency: the photo of Mr. Obama, in the Situation Room, with Hillary Rodham Clinton and other members of his national security team, awaiting news of the raid on Osama bin Laden. The May 2011 photo depicts an engaged leader, in the center of a closely knit team, willing to take calculated risks but viscerally aware of the human stakes involved.

Like many official photos, this one said much about the president without revealing the full truth. Seemingly united in that moment, the president’s team is, in fact, a fractious group whose members are often at odds with one another, and Mr. Obama may be the most aloof president since Richard M. Nixon. Shot in the Situation Room, the nerve center of our government, the photo gives no indication that many of the president’s appointees see it and the rest of the West Wing as kinds of fortresses far removed from other government agencies.

There is no single template for the effective exercise of presidential power. In the modern era, Dwight D. Eisenhower applied the skills he mastered as a general, Lyndon B. Johnson horse-traded his way to legislative triumphs, Ronald Reagan managed with a light touch as if he were a congenial “chairman of the board,” the elder George Bush oversaw what was arguably the most disciplined and inclusive national security process in recent history and Bill Clinton was able to strike a balance between master politician and wonk in chief.

Each of these presidents understood the danger of personalizing the presidency, of making it too much about one man; each took care to harness resources within his cabinet and among his deputies.

Successful modern presidents share an experience that Barack Obama does not have: before becoming president, each played an executive or leadership role that provided insight as to how to run an effective government.

The management troubles that have dogged the Obama administration are not unique to Mr. Obama or his team. One of the biggest problems facing America today is that in Washington, the ability to effectively run complex organizations is among the skill sets that is least valued in our leaders.

Often people with no management experience — academics, writers or politicians who have never run an office with more than a handful of people — are put in charge of giant, complicated government agencies or processes. In part this is because so many people in government mistakenly believe that being able to articulate ideas is the same as being able to put ideas into action.

This administration provides an object lesson in how, when too many staffers have excessive influence, political calculations often trump good policy choices. When an inner circle maintains too tight a stranglehold over the president’s time and attention, too few views come into play. If isolated by an inner circle, the president will have a harder time fostering cooperation in his administration. During his first term, Mr. Obama’s inner circle included Michelle Obama, Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod, David Plouffe and Pete Rouse. Even top administration officials believe these gatekeepers held power too closely. Staff casualties resulted.

When Obama campaign insiders on the National Security Council staff were thought to have more access to the president than their boss, Gen. James L. Jones, the general reportedly felt undermined and left the administration. Ms. Jarrett is said to be seen as so powerful that hardly anyone dares to cross her.

Despite constant behind-the-scenes grumbling from top officials, few appear to have successfully challenged her. Acknowledging how much the president values her opinion, staffers complain about her involvement in matters outside her competence. Battles with Ms. Jarrett reportedly played a role in at least one top official’s decision to leave the administration.

Mr. Obama’s top advisers say they often feel alienated from the president. There is a sense in the White House that “Barack Obama’s theory of government is he is the government.”

Mr. Obama’s perceived aloofness didn’t help his relations with Congress. Many Hill Democrats resent the fact that the president essentially did not consult with them during the last campaign, regularly keeping them away from him during his campaign appearances.

CHIEF executives who have visited the White House for much publicized consultations with the president and senior staff report that Mr. Obama appears to be more interested in delivering his message than in listening to others. This, too, speaks to Mr. Obama’s management weakness. Selecting a diverse team, creating a system in which ideas surface, listening to those ideas and then empowering others to put them into action are the cornerstones of good management — and of effective leadership.

The fact that Mr. Obama is not a good manager does not mean Americans were unwise to have elected him rather than Mitt Romney, who presented himself as an experienced business leader. There is no shortage of successful businessmen who flopped in government; Paul H. O’Neill, John W. Snow or John E. Bryson are examples. Public sector management poses its own unique challenges. Great business leaders and great governmental leaders require different personalities, skill sets, tactics and backgrounds.

The challenge here extends beyond Mr. Obama. The American electorate doesn’t ask questions about management skills. Congress rarely raises the issue of management when considering nominees for large, complicated cabinet agencies, many of which are larger than big corporations. Establishing a culture in which the metrics of successful governance are valued, discussed and evaluated is a vital step toward addressing a problem of which the current president’s management troubles is but a symptom. It would be helpful to have a permanent professional bureaucracy with continuing management responsibilities, as do many other nations. It would also be useful to consider salaries for top officials that provide incentives to the most qualified (much could be learned here from Singapore, which has blazed an important trail in this regard).

In the end, the success of our constitutional system depends primarily on how the occupant of the Oval Office governs. No president can succeed unless he views his job as collaborative, as requiring the motivation and empowerment of a vast United States executive branch bureaucracy, as being in partnership with Congress, as benefiting from a broad and diverse group of advisers, as being the kind of undertaking that promotes creativity even if it means embracing unpopular or even unsuccessful ideas. We know that for the next four years we will have a much more experienced president than the one who occupied it during the term just past. But if Barack Obama is to be a successful president — if he is to lead our country toward economic recovery, climate health and increased security — he must master the day-to-day management of government.


David Rothkopf is the chief executive of the FP Group, the publisher of Foreign Policy magazine, and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.


A version of this op-ed appeared in print on January 20, 2013, on page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Managing The Oval Office.

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