Contingency Planning

The New York Times has a rambling piece this morning on what the Bush administration is doing to prep the Obama transition team to deal with a major international crisis that I think conceals two important points. First, the Bush administration is giving fairly intensive crisis training to top career Homeland Security officials who will be filling in for political appointees who are leaving in the next couple of weeks but are unlikely to be replaced by Inauguration Day:

In addition to the White House contingency memorandums, the Department of Homeland Security said it had given crisis training to nearly 100 career officials who may fill in while Mr. Obama’s appointees await Senate confirmation. Starting before the election, those career workers have conducted exercises alongside departing political appointees to test their responses.

The second point is, I think, the more important one. No matter what anyone thinks of Bush's policies or judgments, on his end, the transition has been handled very smoothly and professionally, and with the possible exception of Blair House, graciously:

Mr. Bush said Tuesday that a top priority in his final days in office is to help Mr. Obama get ready to govern. “We care about him,” he said in an interview with CNN. “We want him to be successful, and we want the transition to work.”

A spokeswoman for Mr. Obama’s office said she had no comment. But other Democrats working with the transition said they appreciated the Bush team’s efforts. “This doesn’t absolve the Bush administration of some of their judgments they’ve made over the years, but this is the right thing to do,” said a Democrat close to the transition who did not want to be named to avoid alienating the team. “This is when enlightened self-interest works.”

Mr. Cressey, who has been a critic of Mr. Bush’s national security policy, said: “I give them a lot of points for doing this. There could be zero down time for the new team coming in.”

Huge amounts of credit for this, of course, should go to Clay Johnson. But I think the transition is also one of those unusual moments in the presidency when the guy leaving office and the guy walking into it are united by the fact that there have been fewer than fifty people who have done what they did, and are about to do. I have no idea what Bush's personal feelings are about Obama, but I think he does care about him. He knows what the job is like and how hard it is, and I'm sure that's impossible to put aside when he thinks about the transition, no matter how much he may oppose Obama's policies or resent his successor for how he portrayed Bush on the campaign trail.