Running Against Dysfunction

You wouldn't know it from the nonstop media coverage of the 2008 presidential aspirants, but the election still is well over a year away.

Nonetheless, it's already becoming clear that this is likely to be one of those election cycles in which management of the federal government actually becomes a burning issue in the ongoing debate. And, intriguingly, that debate is shaping up to be not just a battle of sound bites, but a genuine discussion about how to improve the government's underlying capacity to address the challenges facing the country.

Consider just a few events that took place over a couple of weeks this spring. First, Richard Lowry, editor of the influential conservative magazine National Review, weighed in with a cover story headlined "A Question of Competence." He wrote that "the Bush administration's increasing association with executive dysfunction" had "created an implicit 'competence primary' in the Republican race" for the 2008 nomination.

This wasn't the way it was supposed to turn out, Lowry noted. The first MBA and CEO president was supposed to bring much-needed discipline to federal operations. But Bush, he wrote, "has made a few key bad decisions about policy and personnel, compounded them by not reacting quickly enough when things began to go wrong, and failed to create a sense of accountability in his government."

Lowry meticulously cataloged what he called the "lowlights" of Bush's tenure, including prewar Iraq planning, the Hurricane Katrina response, the handling of the firing of U.S. attorneys and the response to conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Taken together, he wrote, if these events "were to be turned into a trashy TV documentary, it would be billed, 'When Bureaucracy Goes Bad.' " That, he argued, had buoyed the campaign of former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, whose popular image is that of a highly effective government manager, especially in times of crisis.

At about the same time Lowry's assessment of the race appeared, John Fund of The Wall Street Journal's online Opinion Journal interviewed another candidate flirting with entering the GOP campaign -- former Republican senator and current "Law and Order" actor Fred Thompson.

Fund wrote that "the federal government's inability to function effectively would likely be a major theme" in a Thompson campaign.

The Tennessee ex-senator, who headed the then-Governmental Affairs Committee during his tenure on Capitol Hill, told Fund that "audits have shown we've lost control of the waste and mismanagement in our most important agencies. It's getting so bad it's affecting our national security." The next president, he said, needs to "get down in the weeds and fix a civil service system that makes it too hard to hire good employees and too hard to fire bad ones."

Meanwhile, at the other end of the political spectrum, one of the Democratic front-runners, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., was going out of her way to endorse a nascent effort to beef up the government's capacity to hire good employees.

In mid-March, she cleared time from a busy campaign schedule to make an appearance in support of proposed legislation to create a U.S. Public Service Academy -- the equivalent of West Point or the Naval Academy for aspiring civil servants. The measure would dedicate $205 million to fund a 5,000-student institution aimed at producing top-quality federal employees.

"We face big challenges as a nation that will require an active leadership and citizenry," Clinton said at a press conference. "I have no doubt that Americans are ready, willing and able to answer the call."

It's not unusual for presidential candidates to fire salvos at the bureaucracy in the course of their campaigns. But it is highly unusual for them to open a (potential) campaign by discussing agency audits and civil service reform, or to endorse specific proposals to bolster the bureaucracy. So with the first presidential primaries still many months away, it's already clear that this is no ordinary campaign.