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Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2000; 2 p.m. EST

Each president faces a new set of obstacles and each president handles those obstacles in a different way.

What will the new president face when he enters the Oval Office? Which candidate is better prepared to handle the challenge?

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washingtonpost.com: Good afternoon Paul and welcome. We will elect either Bush or Gore as our president next Tuesday. What will the new president be faced with, both positive and negative, when he walks into the Oval Office?

Paul Light: The first challenge is an empty White House. Everything gets stripped clean--the files, the computer drives, you name it. The problem is finding the institutional memory that has been moved out. One answer is to bring in experienced aides, another is to make contact with all the good government groups around town that are now doing work on the transition. Try www.whitehouse2001.org for basic information on what key White House offices do. Or try our own site at www.appointee.brookings.org for information on how to get a presidential appointment.

Once past moving in, the real challenge is setting priorities. There's only so much a new president can do by way of influencing the national agenda. Clinton asked too much, George H.W. Bush may have asked too little.

Arlington, Va.: Mr. Light, what will this election mean for civil servants? I think you have said there are too many political appointees in the government. Thank you.

Paul Light: The election almost certainly means four more years of downsizing regardless of which candidate is elected. Gore has promised not to add a single new position to the workforce, but has defined the term to include contract employees. That's both a breakthrough and a constraint. I hate employment ceilings--they damage morale, weaken core capacity, and get federal employees thinking about exactly the wrong things, meaning how many empty desks there might be in the future. But if we have to have a ceiling, Gore's decision to include contractors is a step in the right direction.

Virginia: Hi, Mr. Light. Do you think 3,000 political appointees is really necessary? Too many political appointees, like you said, have political experiences and none in government? Seemed the law enforcement and intelligence agencies are the only places where a civil servant can become the director.

Paul Light: I think we have far too many executives, both political and career, and have argued that we cut the number in half without any problem whatsoever. Most agencies wouldn't notice a thing, except perhaps the silence coming from HQ. I've also argued that we've got too many layers of management at the middle. One of the big problems in accountability in government is that there are so many layers between the top and bottom of agencies that no one ever knows who's responsible for what. The real problem with layering, and that old game of "telephone" that goes with it, is the lack of accountability.

I do agree that it would be great if career civil servants could dream again of being a secretary or agency head. The most they can hope for today in most agencies is a deputy assistant secretaryship, if that. Although those jobs are still important, they're now buried twelve-twenty layers below an assortment of under secretaries, deputy secretaries, chiefs of staff, and so forth that make the top of the department look very far away, indeed. You have to be a bureaucratic gladiator to get an idea up that chain, and we know what happens to gladiators, don't we?

Virginia Beach, Va.: How much is the future of Social Security dependent on the next president? What can we expect from Bush or from Gore on this issue?

Paul Light: The big problem facing Social Security is decades off--we baby boomers are going to be living good long lives and will want our Social Security taxes back. Unfortunately, it is much tougher to fix the program when the problem hits than it is today. People plan for retirement decades in advance; thus, it is nearly impossible to cut benefits or raise taxes fast enough when a problem hits to address it thoughtfully. Bush and Gore both believe Social Security has a problem, but neither has talked much about 2030 when it could be a very mean season. If we don't do something soon, the election of 2028 or 2032 could be an inter-generational slugfest as young Americans confront the huge taxes they'll need to pay to sustain the baby boomers, or the baby boomers rise up to demand full payment of what have been relatively high tax rates over their working years.

Washington, D.C.: What is the history of transitions between presidents?

Paul Light: The history is not particularly pretty. Most transitions are pretty confusing affairs. Only one of our recent presidents, Ronald Reagan, is credited with a effective transition, while the rest lost important opportunities to take advantage of their honeymoons by delays and missteps in the three months leading to inauguration. The word in Al Kamen's Washington Post piece today that Governor Bush has a staff that has been working on transition planning for some months now, but that Vice President Gore does not. Gore may believe that a friendly transition will be easy compared to the unfriendly (meaning from one party to the other) transition between Clinton and President Bush. If that's true and he's elected, he's about to proven wrong. He should call Governor Bush's father and ask just how friendly a friendly transition really is. Many of the Clinton appointees in office today likely believe they should or will be continued into a Gore administration. That wasn't the case during the Reagan-to-Bush transition and likely won't be the case under a Clinton-to-Gore transition.

Washington, D.C.: Mr. Light,

Do you think the candidates have done a good job preparing for their potential administrations?

Paul Light: There's a tradition in American politics that says "don't count your chickens before they hatch." Both candidates have done minimalist planning, if any planning at all. But I think that both would be able to take the reins of the presidency in relative short order, largely because they are both surrounded by such talented veterans. Both candidates have assembled veteran clubs of Washington insiders that belie their campaign rhetoric about being from outside of government. We'd see a lot of familiar faces in the departments and agencies, and a lot of familiar policy coming from both administrations. No one, and I mean no one, is promising to cut anything the federal government does, incidentally. Americans want everything the federal government does and more. The big question for federal employees is just who is going to honor the promises being made right now.

New York: I have a different sort of question..about the next first lady's role. Hillary restructured what it means to be a first lady. How do you think she has changed the first lady's role in the White House and what should the next first lady expect?

Paul Light: I hope we'll let the next First Lady shape her role as she wishes. And I hope sometime soon we'll all get to talk about the nation's first First Gentleman.

Northern Va.: What is the biggest challenge our new chief executive faces?

Paul Light: That's easy: lower expectations about what the public wants. Both candidates are telling the public that they can get more for less; it's kind of like the K-Mart election. But most of us know better. That big surplus Bush and Gore have been talking about is going out the door right now in the appropriations process.

Washington, D.C.: What do you think will be the big picture economy questions the next president will have to take on? Thank you.

Paul Light: Sustaining the economic growth without heating us up into a recession. All I know is what our economists tell me. No one thinks we'll have a big crash anytime soon, but there's a tremendous amount of anxiety out there, and many Americans are being squeezed. Frankly, my big question here in Washington is how to get to work faster. It's driving me nuts.

Wilmette, Ill.: Assuming Bush wins and the GOP retains control of both houses of Congress, how can we expect Bush to deal with the Republican majority, in light of his campaign committment to a "bipartisan" approach to addressing "real issues for real people"?

Paul Light: I think Bush will find that Republicans in Congress can be just as tough to deal with as Democrats. The fact is that the Founders of this country designed a political system that is easy to stalemate. They gave the president, House, and Senate different electoral calendars, different constituencies, different jobs, and different incentives to cooperate. What's amazing to me is that this system works at all. But it most certainly does. We'll be releasing a study at Brookings in a month of so titled "Government's Greatest Achievements of the Past 50 Years." It's a remarkable list of what the federal government has tried to do, and where it succeeded and failed. We sometimes get so caught up the partisanship of the moment that we forget how much government has done to make this nation and world a better place to live. Check back in early December to see what came out as the number one achievement of the past half century at wwww.brookings.edu/endeavors. I'll bet you most readers won't get the number one right!

Washington, D.C.: Are the political polls reliable predictors of what will happen next week or is this still a horserace?

Paul Light: Feels like a horse-race to me. I love watching the polls, but they're so close and contain so much volatility that I wouldn't bet on anything right now.

Arlington, Va.: What kind of foreign policy issues will the new president have to face? Do you think when it comes to foreign policy that Bush is really not qualified? How is Bush's lack of experience different than Clinton's was back in '92?

Paul Light: I really don't like the current debate about qualifications for office. Bush is well schooled on the key issues and surrounded by very talented advisers. The real question is whether you trust the candidate to make a decision in real time. To what extent have both candidates made tough choices in the past? How much would they worry about putting U.S. lives in harm's way? Any one can learn the names of foreign leaders; the real question for me is whether they will have the strength and courage to know what to say about "hello." That's a decision you have to make in judging the campaign rhetoric and past records.

Fairfax, Va.: The Reagan and Bush people hated each other in 1988 and the Bush and Clinton turnover in 1992 was ugly. Do you think the Clinton people might give the Gore people a rude welcome rather than to the Bush people?

Paul Light: All I know is that Reagan had to instruct his own appointees to submit their resignations to the new Bush team more than once. The fact is that the Clinton folks who have just arrived will assume, rightly or wrongly, that they should be given a chance to stay. And for some, like the federal Inspectors General where continuity counts, they absolutely should. But Gore's got his own friends, contacts, and advisers who will get the top jobs, and they'll want the option to let the others go.

Washington, D.C.: The next president appoints a number of Supreme Court justices, correct? What kind of issues will this bring up for the next president?

Paul Light: The next president only gets to appoint justices if one or more of the current nine retires or dies in office. Obviously, Bush and Gore have very different images of what constitutes a qualified justice. Although both have refused to issue litmus tests, there can't much doubt that Bush would favor conservatives in the model of Scalia and Thomas, while Gore would nominate liberals. But presidents have been burned before. If I'm remembering my history right, Dwight Eisenhower characterized his nomination of Earl Warren as chief justice as the "biggest damn mistake" he ever made. That's why presidents pay so much attention to the records of those they nominate in search of clues for future decisions. But the Supreme Court, or the "marble temple," as it's sometimes called, can change an ideologue into a grand consensus-builder.

Hartford, Conn.: Do you think this will still be a messy transition if it goes from Clinton to Gore. Clinton doesn't seem to want to leave.

Paul Light: Clinton is going to have one tough time adjusting to being an ex-president. He is a very young man with two or three careers left in him. He could go the Carter route and build a distinguished career as peace-maker, change-agent, and elder stateman, but Clinton needs to take some time to think things through. His recent interview with Esquire suggests that he's still come some soul-searching to do about what happened to him in office, too.

Washington, D.C.: Do you believe the next president will confront the issue of D.C. citizens becoming fully represented in both houses of Congress?

Paul Light: I just don't see it happening. Sorry. The odds are sure to get better under Mayor Williams as the city improves, but the notion of adding two Democrats to the Senate makes it a tough sell. Perhaps we should divide Utah into two states, which would guarantee two matching seats to the Republicans as part of the bargain? That's the only way I can solve the politics for now.

Washington, D.C.: Mr. Light, How important is it that the next president be a great communicator. Neither candidate seems to have that gift (Clinton definitely has it)?

Paul Light: We've had some not great communicators who did pretty well over the years, but the modern presidency seems to thrive on someone who can "go public" to the nation with grace and passion. You see the exhaustion that comes with those great communicators, however. They are often followed by less graceful speakers who give us a bit of break.

Paul Light: What a joy. Just wish Brookings would put up a different picture of me.

washingtonpost.com: That was our last question for Paul Light of the Brookings Institution. Thank you to Paul and to all who participated.
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