Calls for a better presidential transition next fall are a cottage industry in Washington, and for good reason: The next president must hit the ground running.
Unless their transition planning is so secret that it has yet to leak out -- which is hard to believe, given the intensity of campaign coverage -- Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama are already late on this important task. Done well and acknowledged publicly, transition planning reassures voters that the candidates are serious about governing. Done in secret, voters can only assume that the winner will wake up on Nov. 5 in a Robert Redford moment, asking "What do we do now?"
There are many reasons why the two candidates might postpone transition planning. Obama was in a tight primary contest that took him into June, while McCain has been desperately trying to weld together a campaign machine for months. It's not unusual that both would want to avoid the real distractions of getting too far ahead of themselves, or would be loath to spend hard-earned campaign dollars or a nanosecond of time on the details of a transition that may never occur.
Perhaps most important, the candidates are worried about how it would look to the public. The front-runner (Obama for now) cannot announce that he has begun a transition plan without being accused of hubris, while the underdog (McCain) cannot make such an announcement without raising questions about his sanity.
Nevertheless, the arguments for detailed and publicly acknowledged pre-convention transition planning are overwhelming. This is a situation in which the plane cannot be built while flying it.
For starters, the presidential appointments process has become a nightmare of endless vetting that creates long vacancies once the president is inaugurated. Whereas John F. Kennedy's first round of roughly 200 Senate-confirmed appointees was in office by late spring in Year 1, George W. Bush's class of almost 600 was not fully in place until late spring in Year 2.
The challenge is not just in the sheer number of appointees who have to be cleared for nomination and confirmation. It is also in completing 60-plus pages of forms. One of the first things potential nominees need to do is dig out their high school yearbooks and identify someone, anyone, who can vouch for them when the Federal Bureau of Investigation comes calling. One of the next is providing the reason for every foreign trip, Canada and Mexico included, taken over the last 15 years.
