Bush-Obama handoff: Legacy material

by Mark Silva

It's almost certain that the handoff of the White House from President George W. Bush to President-elect Barack Obama will pass more smoothly than the greeting that Bush's new crew faced in 2001.

The Ws were removed from the keyboards in the executive office building of President Bill Clinton's departing administration.

And it's unquestionable that the transition from a Bush White House to an Obama White House will pass more quickly than the misstep-plagued passing of the baton from Herbert Hoover to Franklin D. Roosevelt. There were four months then of publicly divisive disputes in the midst of the Great Depression.

When Bush and Obama and the outgoing and incoming First Ladies Laura Bush and Michelle Obama meet Monday afternoon at the White House, the outgoing president will already have set in motion a transition that Bush hopes to make part of his legacy for its orderliness. And the incoming leader will already have publicly declared that the 43rd president will serve out his term without interference from the 44th president who will be sworn into office on Jan. 20, 2009.

"The president himself has made it clear that he's going to be president, and now the president-elect has said, "Yeah, he's going to be the president,' " said Stephen Hess, a Brookings Institution scholar and expert on transitions. "Is this going to be a replay of Hoover and Roosevelt?... The answer is no."

See the rest of the report on the Bush-Obama handoff in today's Tribune and here in the Swamp:

Obama already has passed through the halls of the West Wing--he arrived through the side door for a summit that Bush called with the presidential candidates, Obama and Sen. John McCain, and congressional leaders when Bush was pressing Congress for a $700 billion bailout for the economy this fall.

This time, the president will take the president-elect to the Oval Office, an enclave with tall French-windowed views of the Rose Garden and South Lawn and a lighted-dome ceiling that casts the chamber in an officious yet comfortable glow. While the two have their mid-afternoon meeting, Laura Bush will give Michelle Obama a tour of the White House residence. The first lady also gets her own office suite in the adjoining East Wing.

When Bush and Clinton met in the Oval Office on Dec. 19, 2000, the incoming president had just survived a 36-day court battle over the disputed 2000 election. The two met for two hours, both with aides and then over lunch.

"It's actually been such a huge honor to come as the president-elect," Bush said then. "I'm here to listen, if the president is kind enough to offer me advice."

Clinton said the only advice he had to offer was: "Get a good team, and do what you think is right."

The handoff proved somewhat less harmonious weeks later, when the Bush team arrived to find some minor office vandalism, including the purloined keyboard letter of the middle name of the incoming president.

The two teams quickly patched up the delicate matter of vandalism, however.

"We made an offer to go over and survey what was done--take a look and see if we can make amends," Clinton spokesman Jake Siewert said at the time. "We asked to take a look at the damage and offered to try to sort it out. They said that it was isolated incidents and that that would not be necessary."

Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer said: "We were content to put it all behind us."

Every transition has its snags--even when the White House stays within the party.

" George H.W. Bush had a lot of trouble with the Reagan administration when he was elected," says Paul Light, professor of public service at New York University and an expert on transitions. "Everybody thought they would keep their jobs, but Bush cleared house...McCain would have, too.

"Our recent transitions have been civil," Light adds. "I don't think the Johnson-Nixon transition was particularly loving. I don't think the Carter-Reagan transition was particularly nice, but all of these transitions have been cordial to a point."

The current president has made it clear that he wants a model handoff of the presidential residence on Pennsylvania Avenue and the West Wing and East Wing offices that come with the place.

"This peaceful transfer of power is one of the hallmarks of a true democracy," Bush told members of his Cabinet, the vice president and staffers on the South Lawn last week. "And ensuring that this transition is as smooth as possible is a priority for the rest of my presidency.... All of us must ensure that the next president and his team can hit the ground running."

Hundreds of people are involved in the actual transition planning. And it's not as if there's no money to make it all happen--as much as $10 million budgeted by Congress for the 2008-09 presidential transition--to help both the outgoing and incoming staffs get their affairs in order.

And it's not as if the president-elect doesn't have decisions awaiting him, including a duty to fill 4,000 political positions, more than 1,100 subject to Senate confirmation, as well as getting a new federal budget ready for Congress by early February, with the Bush appointees already forming the basis of it.

To help the incoming president, the outgoing administration has formed a Transition Coordinating Council, which includes Bush Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and other White House deputies, the attorney general, director of national intelligence and director of the Office of Management and Budget and consultants.

Norm Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is among the advisers who have met with Bush's transition council. "I am really impressed with their commitment," Ornstein said. "I think we see it in the creation of the council. This is coming from the top."

This passing of the torch holds a certain promise.

"I can't think of a superlative one," NYU's Light says. "We may be in one, but it's not clear yet. The Bush administration is making every effort possible to smooth the transition and has developed a general ethic that is quite positive.... But at the end of the day, Obama ran on a platform that dragged Bush through the mud, and I don't know how cooperative the Bush political operatives will be."