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If you haven't already seen it, I wanted to call your attention to our new guide to the ongoing drama surrounding Office of Special Counsel chief Scott Bloch and the various Bush administration officials he's investigated -- all while under investigation himself the whole time. If you're having as much trouble as I am keeping track of this web of still-developing controversies, it's a handy tool.

In an appearance on Federal News Radio this morning, ex-GSA Administrator Lurita Doan provided some more details on her firing earlier this week, and her reaction to it.

Tuesday evening, Doan said, she was summoned to her first-ever meeting at the White House, with Bush's chief of staff, Joshua Bolten, and White House Counsel Fred Fielding. Here's how she described it:

Less than 30 seconds into the meeting, I was told the White House was requesting my resignation. I tell you, it was humbling and frankly, it was bizarre. Naturally, I immediately stated, "I serve at the pleasure of the president," and I immediately gave my resignation.

I was surprised to be told that from the White House point of view, I was considered, and this is a direct quote, a "distraction to progress at GSA." I know I have had a high profile, and I know I've taken very public, very vocal stands on a lot of very contentious issues. You know, I've been a tiger on procurement, of course, I love talking about telework, my passion is talking about expanding and working on expanding our ports of entry and making opportunities for small business. But I saw that as my job.

I have to say, I don't think this was about Doan's position on telework. And it's pretty clear at this point it wasn't about allegations she violated the Hatch Act more than a year ago. But that didn't stop the New York Times editorial page from pushing that notion in today's edition.

Stay tuned to GovernmentExecutive.com Monday for a full interview with Doan.

If not, we've got a tool to help you out. We've launched a new special report on the looming change in administrations, providing links to key resources and regularly updated coverage from Government Executive and GovernmentExecutive.com.

Help us out and let us know if there are any links we should add to the page.

The International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers has settled on its candidate for president, and the endorsement goes to ... Barack Obama.

The union represents engineers, scientists and technicians at the Defense and Energy departments and NASA.

Obama, said IFPTE president Gregory Junemann, "will immediately reverse the last eight years of the union busting promulgated on our nation’s civil servants; will stand against free trade agreements like NAFTA that fail to protect American workers; will address our nation’s dangerous health care crisis; will work to oppose irresponsible privatization schemes in the public and federal sectors; [and] will work to protect the pensions and retirement security of working Americans..."

Obama praised IFPTE for "working to make sure that Washington is working for working Americans." He added, "they’ll have a partner in the White House when I’m president. I’ll fight for organized labor by protecting the right to organize. I’ll support vigorous reinvestment in our federal research and development agencies, including NASA, to maintain America’s leadership in science and technology and to foster economic competitiveness."

Being president of the United States is a pretty tough job. The hours are long, you can never really escape the office and the pressure is, to say the least, intense at times.

But ex-president is a pretty cushy gig, the Washington Post reports today. First, there's the lifetime pension --$191,300 this year. Then there are "travel costs, postage, office rental and supplies" -- and Secret Service protection. And all of that, of course, is on top of the money and perks former presidents can generate for themselves in the private sector.

John McCain may be a big fan of citizenship and public service, but he's no fan of big government. Here he is yesterday on CNBC's Kudlow and Company, talking about his economic recovery plan:

We need to have a year pause, a year pause on discretionary spending, except for veterans and defense. And let’s scrutinize every agency of government. ... It is not taxes that are insufficient, it’s spending that’s out of control. And one of the areas I would go after first and hardest is defense acquisition.

I can't believe I forgot to blog about this yesterday: The Washington Post has blown the lid off the biggest Washington story in ages: An analysis of maps reveals conclusively that the city is the lair of Satan. The scoop comes courtesy of David Bay, director of Cutting Edge Ministries in Lexington, S.C.

The paper reports: "Using Dupont and Logan circles as northern points, Bay instructs, you can trace various interlocking streets to form a demonic pentagram, one that bores directly into 1600 Pennsylvania Ave."

That explains all kinds of things.

Of course, over at BoingBoing, they've reported what might be an even bigger cartographical discovery: "A giant malevolent dachshund bearing down on the Capitol."

Hillary Clinton has made her experience and leadership a centerpiece of her presidential campaign. She may live to regret that.

In a piece in The Politico today, Jim VandeHei and David Paul Kuhn come down pretty hard on Clinton:

Clinton has overseen two major staff shake-ups in two months. She has left a trail of unpaid bills and unhappy vendors and had to loan her own campaign $5 million to keep it afloat in January. Her campaign badly underestimated her main adversary, Barack Obama, miscalculated the importance of organizing caucus states and was caught flat-footed after failing to lock up the nomination on Super Tuesday.

It would be easy to dismiss all of this as fairly conventional political stumbling — if she hadn’t made her supreme readiness and managerial competence the central issue of her presidential campaign.

As I've already noted, I think running a campaign effectively is not necessarily an indicator that a person will be great at being CEO of a sprawling federal bureaucracy. But running a campaign ineffectively certainly isn't a good sign.

Before it fades into the mists of time, I wanted to take note of John McCain's speech last week at the Naval Academy. Here's what he had to say on the subject of government, public service and citizenship:

I'm a conservative, and I believe it is a very healthy thing for Americans to be skeptical about the purposes and practices of public officials. We shouldn't expect too much from government -- nor should it expect too much from us. Self-reliance -- not foisting our responsibilities off on others -- is the ethic that made America great.

But when healthy skepticism sours into corrosive cynicism, our expectations of our government become reduced to the delivery of services. And to some people the expectations of liberty are reduced to the right to choose among competing brands of designer coffee.

What is lost is, in a word, citizenship. For too many Americans, the idea of good citizenship does not extend beyond walking into a voting booth every two or four years and pulling a lever. And too few Americans demand of themselves even that first obligation of self-government.

But citizenship properly understood is what Ronald Reagan was talking about when he said that Americans "are a nation that has a government -- not the other way around." Citizenship is not just the imposition of the mundane duties of democracy. Nor is it the unqualified entitlement to the protections and services of the state.

Citizenship thrives in the communal spaces where government is absent. Anywhere Americans come together to govern their lives and their communities -- in families, churches, synagogues, museums, symphonies, the Little League, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, the Salvation Army or the VFW -- they are exercising their citizenship.

Citizenship is defined by countless acts of love, kindness and courage that have no witness or heraldry and are especially commendable because they are unrecorded.

Although it exists apart from government, citizenship is the habits and institutions that preserve democracy. It is the ways, small and large, we come together to govern ourselves. Citizenship is the responsible exercise of freedom, and is indispensable to the proper functioning of a democracy. ...

Love of country, my friends, is another way of saying love of your fellow countrymen -- a truth I learned a long time ago in a country very different from ours.

That is the good cause that summons every American to service. If you find faults with our country, make it a better one. If you are disappointed with the mistakes of government, join its ranks and work to correct them. I hope more Americans would consider enlisting in our Armed Forces. I hope more would consider running for public office or working in federal, state and local governments. But there are many public causes where your service can make our country a stronger, better one than we inherited. Wherever there is a hungry child, a great cause exists. Where there is an illiterate adult, a great cause exists. Wherever there are people who are denied the basic rights of Man, a great cause exists. Wherever there is suffering, a great cause exists.

From his appearance yesterday at Foggy Bottom:

Our citizens have really no idea how competent, courageous and successful the people here who work at the State Department are -- I do. After my -- now my eighth year as president, I've gotten to know the people in the State Department well, and I'm impressed, and so should our citizens.

But the president also spoke of the need "to strengthen the State Department's capacity to bring freedom and peace around the world" through "efficiencies" and "interoperability." That, apparently, was the subject of deeper discussions that occurred behind closed doors.

Many times, information security problems aren't with the systems, but the people -- be they federal employees, contractors, or the managers who are supposed to monitor their work and keep higher-ups informed about potentially embarrassing incidents.

Such is the case the the news that three contract employees at the State Department poked through Barack Obama's passport files. Two of them were fired, and the other was disciplined, but didn't get canned.

The department's official position so far, expressed in a late-night conference call with reporters by spokesman Sean McCormack, is that this was merely a case of "imprudent curiosity." The department's inspector general will look into whether that's actually the case.

Obama's camp was quick to place blame on the Bush administration. "This is an outrageous breach of security and privacy, even from an administration that has shown little regard for either over the last eight years," said campaign spokesman Bill Burton.

The incidents took place on Jan. 9, Feb. 21, and March 14. But McCormack said senior State Department leaders only became aware of them yesterday. Which begs the question: Contract employees were fired for improperly accessing sensitive records on a high-profile presidential candidate, and no one thought of reporting it to the top brass for, in one case, more than two months?

"I will fully acknowledge that this information should have been passed up the line," said Patrick F. Kennedy, State's undersecretary for management, at last night's briefing. "It was dealt with at the office level where the incidents occurred by the office-level supervisors, who took immediate steps when they saw this. ... We have a very, very sophisticated computer tracking system that looks out for and looks out over the use of the computer, and when it sees anything that is potentially inappropriate, the computer calls it to the attention of the working-level supervisor. The system worked; it was called to their attention. They acted and -- but I will admit, they failed to pass the information up the chain to a sufficiently high level."

Want to know what Barack Obama likes in the way of earmarks? He's released a full list of his requests for fiscal 2006 and 2007.

(Hat tip: Politico's Ben Smith, via Andrew Sullivan.)

Attention Americans: Super Bowl-winning quarterback Eli Manning, appointed by President Bush to serve on the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports, wants you to get off the couch and be more active. Manning is launching an effort to register a million people for the National President's Challenge, six-week program designed to combat obesity by raising particpants' levels of physical activity.

I wonder if this is the kind of "activity" Manning has in mind:

We're only just beginning to see that question explored. McCain himself hasn't given a great deal of hints in this area, other than to say he's more of a leader than a manager and that he's not a fan of "bloated, irresponsible and incompetent government."

But eight years ago, McCain's then-communications director offered this morsel of wisdom about what a McCain administration would look like: it would, he said, be based on the idea that "government should have a limited but activist role in those areas where government is involved."

Former Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore., who served with McCain in the Senate, indicated he would be a hands-on manager as president. "He would be the chief of staff, he would be the commander, no question about it," Packwood said.

In a new study, the Congressional Research Service reports that presidents, presidents-elect, and candidates for president have been attacked 15 times in the country's history, and five of them have been killed. Four of the past six presidents have been victims or targets.

Given that recent history, this line from the study's summary is depressing: "The report will be updated and revised if developments require."

There may be less than a year left in the Bush administration, but the Office of Personnel Management still has a singular message for new members of the Senior Executive Service: It's all about implementing the President's Management Agenda. The agency is continuing to send out invitations to its regularly scheduled orientation sessions on the president's plans for new SES members.

The briefings, writes OPM Director Linda M. Springer in the invitation, provide an opportunity for the newly minted execs to "learn about the President’s Management Agenda, his vision and values, and to discuss the unique challenges you face with your new responsibilities. As a new member of the SES, you will play a key role in turning President Bush’s principles of a citizen-centered, results-oriented, and market-based government into reality."

The SESers better be prepared to move quickly. The next session isn't until the end of March, and come next January, there's likely to be a whole new management agenda.

"She's our girl!" That's what the National Federation of Federal Employees screamed in a press release issued Friday. And just who is the "girl" in question? That would be Hillary Clinton.

“In her time in the United States Senate, Hillary has been a tremendous advocate of federal workers,” said Richard N. Brown, NFFE's president. So, he added, "We are proud and honored to give her our endorsement.”

In his withdrawal announcement today, erstwhile GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney couldn't resist one final shot at the federal bureaucracy:

Did you see that today, government workers make more money than people who work in the private sector. Can you imagine what happens to an economy where the best opportunities are for bureaucrats? It’s high time to lower taxes, including corporate taxes, to take a weed-whacker to government regulations, to reform entitlements, and to stand up to the increasingly voracious appetite of the unions in our government!

The White House is so yesterday. Or so thinks the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City, apparently. The organization has launched a contest called "White House Redux" to gather new designs for what it calls the "the ultimate architectural symbol of political power." The best "ideas, designs, descriptions, images, and videos" submitted will be featured in a month-long exhibition at the Storefront in July.

(Hat tip: BoingBoing)

"Perhaps the most telling critique of [Barack] Obama, to my mind, is his lack of executive experience," Andrew Sullivan writes today. He notes that he asked Obama directly about this issue during an interview in connection with a profile Sullivan wrote on the candidate in the December 2007 issue of our sister publication, The Atlantic. Obama responded, he writes, by talking about his campaign:

He observed out that he was up against the full Clinton establishment, all the chits she and her husband had acquired over the years, and the apparatus they had constructed within the party. He had to build a national campaign from scratch, raise money, staff an extremely complex electoral map, and make key decisions on spending and travel. He asked me to judge his executive skills by observing how he was managing a campaign.

"By that standard," Sullivan says, "who isn't impressed?"

Very few aren't impressed, I'd guess. But is Obama's standard appropriate? I'd suggest that historically there's a fairly weak correlation between skill at campaigning and skill at running the executive branch. Bill Clinton was a campaigner par excellence, but a strong case could be made that didn't translate into above-average effectiveness running the executive branch. The same could be said for George W. Bush. Jimmy Carter ran a highly impressive out-of-nowhere presidential campaign, but seemed overwhelmed at times by the challenge of running the massive federal apparatus.

In his 2000 book The Presidential Difference, Fred I. Greenstein of Princeton University makes the case that the most effective modern presidential executive was someone who had never before run for office until he was elected president -- Dwight Eisenhower. What Eisenhower had done was to run what was in essence a massive bureaucratic operation.

Many presidential candidates fall into the trap of thinking that doing things like making "key decisions on spending and travel" are great preparation for governing the country. But tough as they are, such decisions are small potatoes compared to, say, developing and implementing a $3.1 trillion budget.

Running a campaign has very little in common with running a country -- which is not to suggest, of course, that Obama might not be as great at the latter as he appears to be at the former. But if he is, it'll be much more impressive than winning a race for office.

Here's President Bush crowing about his administration's (relatively) paperless fiscal 2009 budget:

I submitted the budget today to Congress -- it's on a laptop notebook, an e-budget. It saves paper, saves trees, saves money. I think it's the first budget submitted electronically.

At the risk of parsing the president's words too closely, I hope his budget team didn't actually submit the budget on a "laptop notebook." I think that the process could've been handled more efficiently over that newfangled Internet thing.

In his fiscal 2009 budget proposal, President Bush takes his last opportunity to declare that his management reform efforts of the past seven years are actually working. Among the accomplishments he cites:

• More than 1,000 federal programs have been evaluated using the administration's Program Assessment Rating Tool.


• Almost 90 percent of those programs have established or clarified their performance goals.


• 82 percent of programs are achieving their goals.


• 55 percent of programs that were initially unable to demonstrate any results have improved on that rating.


• 81 percent of agencies have reduced "skills gaps" in mission-critical occupations.
  
• 78 percent of new federal employees are now hired within 45 days, up from 64 percent in 2006.


• For the third straight year, all agencies completed their annual financial statements with 45 days after the close of the fiscal year.


• Last year, 13 agencies got clean audit opinions on their financial statements. The administration is shooting for 21 agencies to meet that goal this year.

Democratic presidential contenders Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been having a debate for several weeks now over whether managerial competence or inspirational leadership is more important in a president. Now a couple of Republican contenders are having their turn.

Speaking in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., late last week, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., drew a contrast between himself and one of his top competitors, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Here's how MSNBC's "First Read" characterized McCain's remarks:

"I think everybody knows the difference between leadership and management," McCain told a group of reporters gathered at an airport here. "You can hire managers all the time, people who do the mechanics, people who implement policies, people who are good with assets. Leadership is people who inspire… Leadership is people who have had hands on experience with patriotism and service to the nation… Leadership is the ability to inspire and the ability to make Americans serve causes greater than their self-interest."

Asked what that description of leadership implied about his biggest opponent in Florida, McCain said, "Governor Romney is touting his qualities and his experience and resume as a manager. I am telling the American people that I am a leader and they know it."

Among the "people who inspire," McCain listed Ronald Reagan and Gen. David Petraeus.

Romney, CNN's "Political Ticker" reported, fired back thusly:

He told supporters in Pensacola that as the only candidate at Thursday’s Florida Republican debate who had worked in the private sector, he was uniquely qualified to lead on economic issues.

He added that in his view, McCain hadn’t done well at the forum: the senator “had to come back and flail a bit, trying to attack my record, saying that my record — 25 years in the business world and three years running the Olympics, and then four years as governor of Massachusetts — that that doesn't qualify me to understand how the economy works."

The New Yorker’s George Packer jumps into the debate over whether the President’s role is managerial or inspirational this week with a piece contrasting the ways in which Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama view the presidency. Packer lays out the choice between their approaches starkly when he says that “if this campaign is, among other things, a referendum on the current occupant of the White House—as elections at the end of failed presidencies inevitably are—then its outcome will be determined partly by whether voters find George W. Bush guilty of incompetence or of demeaning American politics.”

It’s a smart, probing piece that focuses more on how Clinton’s managerial style has evolved over time than on Obama’s obvious inspirational gifts, and how those skills for making policy and getting things done translate to the political campaign Clinton is running. Packer uses an interesting variety of examples, including the fight over Bill Clinton's health care bill and the process that Hillary Clinton used to produce her book It Takes a Village, to describe her reluctant journey to the realization that she needs to focus more on humanizing herself and inspiring voters, and that she can’t rely simply on competence and service delivery. It would be interesting to learn more about how Obama arrived at his theory of the president’s role, and to see whether he’s become more or less invested in management and process over time.--Alyssa Rosenberg

Fred Thompson has made it official: He's out of the presidential race. Politics aside, this means that the race has lost the candidate with arguably the strongest working knowledge of the management challenges facing the federal government right now -- certainly the strongest on the Republican side. And as I keep saying, these issues really matter -- and not just to the people who work in government, but to the country as a whole.

Now that the President of the United States is blogging (and taking questions from Americans), what kind of juicy behind-the-scenes details can we glean about goings-on in the Bush administration? Only this, apparently: The president picks out his own clothes every day.

With the race for the Democratic presidential nomination seeming to come down to a choice between Barack Obama's push for change and Hillary Clinton's focus on experienced leadership, an interesting shift has occurred: Suddenly, the issue of managing the federal government has taken center stage. It started on Monday, when Obama, in an interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal, said the following:

I'm not an operating officer. Some in this debate around experience seem to think the job of the president is to go in and run some bureaucracy. Well, that's not my job. My job is to set a vision of "here's where the bureaucracy needs to go."

Clinton took issue with that in a Democratic debate Tuesday night in Las Vegas:

I do think that being president is the chief executive officer. I respect what Barack said about setting the vision, setting the tone, bringing people together. But I think you have to be able to manage and run the bureaucracy. You've got to pick good people, certainly, but you have to hold them accountable every single day. We've seen the results of a president who, frankly, failed at that. You know, he went in to office saying he was going to have the kind of Harvard Business School CEO model where he'd set the tone, he'd set the goals and then everybody else would have to implement it.

And we saw the failures. We saw the failures along the Gulf Coast with, you know, people who were totally incompetent and insensitive failing to help our fellow Americans. We've seen the failures with holding the administration accountable with the no-bid contracts and the cronyism. So I do think you have to do both. It's a really hard job, and in America we put the head of state and the head of government together in one person.

But I think you've got to set the tone, you've got to set the vision, you've got to set the goals, you've got to bring the country together. And then you do have to manage and operate and hold that bureaucracy accountable to get the results you're trying to achieve.

Obama responded:

Well, there's no doubt that you've got to be a good manager. And that's not what I was arguing. The point, in terms of bringing together a team, is that you get the best people and you're able to execute and hold them accountable. But I think that there's something, if we're going to evaluate George Bush and his failures as president, that I think are much more important. He was very efficient. He was on time all the time, and you know, and had... You know, I'm sure he never lost a paper. I'm sure he knows where it is. What he could not do is to listen to perspectives that didn't agree with his ideological predispositions. ...

I mean, those are the kinds of failures that have to do with judgment. They have to do with vision, the capacity to inspire people. They don't have to do with whether or not he was managing the bureaucracy properly. That's not to deny that there has to be strong management skills in the presidency. It is to say that what has been missing is the ability to bring people together, to mobilize the country, to move us in a better direction, and to be straight with the American people.

I'm not about to make any kind of endorsement in this race or the Republican one, but I'll acknowledge that I'm already on the record as saying that management really matters. In fact, nine months ago, I noted that it looked like the issue of effectively managing government operations might play a central role in this year's presidential contest, and I've been waiting for it to happen ever since.

The White House is taking baby steps into the blogosphere. The Hill reports that Bush administration officials are posting notes from the president's trip to the Middle East on what White House spokeswoman Dana Perino characterizes as a "little bit of a blog." The first of the "Trip Notes" already has been posted, by Perino herself.

Now that President Bush has made it official that most feds don't have to work on Christmas Eve, OPM has come up with some details on his order.

Those of you who already planned to take annual leave that day should note this proviso: "If an employee has scheduled "use or lose" annual leave for December 24, 2007, and is unable to reschedule that leave for use before the end of the leave year (i.e., January 5, 2008), the leave will be forfeited."

White House counsel Fred Fielding has sent a memo to agencies urging them to provide Hatch Act briefings to all of their employees by the end of the year, IEC Journal reports.

"The 2008 election cycle will present many opportunities for federal employees to be involved in the political process," Fielding writes in the memo, "either through their own initiative or through outreach from campaigns." But agencies, he said, need to "ensure that those federal employees who choose to participate in political activity do so in accordance with the high ethical standards the president expects."

Fielding's office will be conducting its own set of Hatch Act briefings for White House staff. Judging from a whole series of events that have unfolded this year, that seems like a prudent idea.

Fred Thompson may understand that the real money in deficit reduction comes from entitlements reform, but apparently he's not going to be able to resist the temptation to package together some more conventional attack-the-bureaucracy proposals aimed at burnishing his small-government credentials.

In the Wall Street Journal's opinion section today, Kimberly A. Strassel writes, "According to a campaign source, in upcoming weeks Mr. Thompson will unveil plans to reduce federal spending by limiting nondefense growth to inflation, earmark reform, and a one-year freeze on the hiring of non-essential civilian workers and contractors."

Of course, that "non-essential" part, if it turns out to be true, is a rather gigantic loophole.

There was a moment in the CNN-YouTube Republican debate last night when Fred Thompson gave as honest an answer as I think you'll ever hear from a politician on reducing federal spending.

Asked what three programs he would cut to help balance the budget, Thompson responded this way:

The problem is that most of the programs we talk about, the ones that get the headlines, would not begin to solve the problem. ... That's why I have laid out a program not to attack entitlements, but to save Social Security. ... Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are the ones we're really going to have to reform if we're going to make any headway on the spending.

Rudy Giuliani was at it again last night in the CNN-YouTube Republican debate. Asked what he would do to reduce the national debt, he once more took the opportunity to flog his pet proposal to slash federal spending and the federal workforce. Here's what he said:

I think you have to do across-the-board spending cuts like Ronald Reagan did -- 5, 10 percent per civilian agency. It should be done right now, actually. President Bush should do it to strengthen the dollar. We should commit not to rehire half of the civilian employees that will retire. That's 42 percent of the federal workforce that will retire in the next 10 years. Don't rehire half of them. Use technology -- one person doing the job of two or three. Every business has done it; the government has to do it.

Isn't it about time somebody started calling him on this stuff? Such as:

• Nobody knows how many federal employees actually will retire in the next 10 years. That 42 percent is merely a projection of people likely to retire based on estimates that have proven less than fully accurate in the past.
• Is Giuliani really in favor of a haphazard cut to federal operations based on who happens to retire? So if FEMA gets an unusually high number of retirements, he's fine with cutting our disaster response capability and potentially leaving excess capacity elsewhere?
• Government, just like the businesses Giuliani touts, already has replaced hundreds of thousands of workers with technology. Bill Clinton proudly claimed credit for slashing nearly 400,000 jobs during his administration, and agencies spent billions of dollars on technology (and contract workers) to continue to meet their missions. (By the way, does anybody think the federal government improved as a result?) Since George W. Bush took office, thousands of jobs have been added back, but mostly in the homeland security and defense areas. Does Mr. 9/11 really think that those are the jobs that we need to eliminate?

As I've said before, issues like these are simply too important to let candidates slide by with glib promises.

Thanks to Chris Dorobek of Federal Computer Week for linking to this Wall Street Journal piece I missed on Mitt Romney's management style. Romney was a consultant for 10 years, and it's pretty clear he'd bring that perspective to bear in running the executive branch.

Here's the key section of the article:

When asked for details about how he would reduce the size of government if elected, he mentions two things: The organizational chart of the executive branch, and consultants. "There's no corporation in America that would have a CEO, no COO, just a CEO, with 30 direct reports."

Running a government organized like this is, he explains, impossible. "So I would probably have super-cabinet secretaries, or at least some structure that McKinsey would guide me to put in place." He seems to catch a note of surprise in his audience, but he presses on: "I'm not kidding, I probably would bring in McKinsey. . . . I would consult with the best and the brightest minds, whether it's McKinsey, Bain, BCG or Jack Welch."

Dorobek also notes that after the Journal piece appeared, TIME columnist Michael Kinsley took some potshots at Romney, consultants and the whole concept of trying to introduce businesslike efficiency into government. "The notion that the cacophony of politics can be replaced with the smooth hum of expertise and that all the challenges our society faces can be solved by making the government run more efficiently has a long and generally laughable history," Kinsley wrote -- and a bipartisan one, too.

Here's just a sampling of headlines from today's Washington Post:

• State Dept. Won't Order Diplomats to Iraq
• TSA Minimizes Failure to Detect Threats
• FEMA Accused Of Wasting More Katrina Funding
• Justice Dept. Conducting Criminal Probe of Baghdad Embassy Contracts

This is a pretty typical day for the newspaper. Can there be any doubt at this stage that management of federal operations is not just something that's worthy of the next president's attention, but the critical issue facing the country in the next few years? If recent history has taught us anything, it's that we should be judging our candidates on the basis of how well they will manage the critical functions of the federal government, which are literally a matter of life and death to Americans. And we should be holding their feet to the fire when they make cavalier policy proposals like not replacing half of federal employees who retire and threatening to cut health benefits for political appointees.

While presidential candidates like to focus on policy proposals, and political reporters remain obsessed with the who's-up-who's-down horse race aspects of the campaign, the critically important issue is whether the next president will form an effective team of appointees, make sure agencies have the capacity to perform the roles they've been assigned, and hold federal managers and executives accountable for results. This issue ought to be central to the campaign, and its barely on the periphery.

John Edwards is still flogging his promise to cut off health care for members of Congress and senior administration officials if the legislative and executive branches fail to agree on a comprehensive health care reform bill within his first six months in office. In fact, Matt Yglesias notes, Edwards is even running ads in Iowa touting the idea.

This is a terrific rhetorical device, but if Edwards is even halfway serious about it, I hope he's going to think it through a little more. Say what you want about political appointees, but they already have enough incentives not to serve their country. Why add more in the form of uncertainty about benefits? Here's what would be truly political courageous: For one of Edwards' opponents to say, "I see your point, John, but getting the most highly qualified and talented people to run government's programs and operations is too important to play games with the basic benefits they might receive in exchange for agreeing to serve and to help lead the effort to make government as efficient and effective as possible."

Yikes! The Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday that the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum can't account for a whopping 80,000 of the 100,000 items it is supposed to have in its possession. The National Archives inspector general says a "near universal" breakdown in security left the facility vulnerable to theft from insiders.

The finding that Reagan's library was so poorly run, the paper reported, "may mortify fans of the late president, who often inveighed against government inefficiency."

Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton has denounced what she calls a Bush administration "power grab" to concentrate more authority in the White House. She says she'd undertake a review of accumulated powers and would "absolutely" consider giving some of them up as president.

Matthew Yglesias has his doubts that Clinton would voluntary relinquish much in the way of executive power, arguing that "she's not committing herself to doing anything in particular." He notes that Charlie Savage, a legal affairs reporter for the Boston Blobe makes the case in this month's Atlantic that a rollback by any future president is unlikely:

Indeed, presidential power has been mostly growing—in fits and starts—since World War II. An early-20th-century president, such as Calvin Coolidge, had no large standing army to command, nor a CIA to use for covert operations. He would not have dreamed of launching a major overseas war without permission from Congress—as Harry Truman did in Korea. He could not utter the magic words state secrets or executive privilege to nullify lawsuits and evade congressional oversight—both of these precedents were set during Dwight Eisenhower’s administration. By exploiting the sense of permanent crisis that surrounded the early Cold War, presidents of both parties cowed both Congress and the Supreme Court. Today, the war on terrorism has provided a similar rationale.

In the "Mother Nature Has a Sick Sense of Humor" department, President Bush announced on Saturday that this is officially "National Forest Products Week." In his announcement, Bush noted that "Under the Healthy Forest Initiative, we are helping to protect the American people, their communities, and the environment from potentially devastating wildfires."

We're not really going to have a government shutdown, are we? Everybody remembers 1995, right? How nobody came out looking good? Still, the fiscal year's ending in a week, almost all of the appropriations bills haven't been passed, and it seems like there's a whole lot of brinksmanship going on.

Let the endorsement season begin! The National Association of Letter Carriers has found its candidate for president: Hillary Clinton. Clinton accepted the endorsement at NALC headquarters in Washington today.

Clinton said she was "honored" to get the nod from the letter carriers. "These hardworking men and women are part of the fabric of every community in America," she said, "and they deserve an advocate in the White House."

This anecdote from Peter Baker's Washington Post piece Monday on bureaucratic resistance to President Bush's second-term democracy-building initiative is making the rounds of the blogosphere:

Defiance of Bush's mandate could be subtle or brazen. The official recalled a conversation with a State Department bureaucrat over a democracy issue.

"It's our policy," the official said.

"What do you mean?" the bureaucrat asked.

"Read the president's speech," the official said.

"Policy is not what the president says in speeches," the bureaucrat replied. "Policy is what emerges from interagency meetings."

I tend to agree with my colleague Matt Yglesias' take on this: "The bureaucrat is sounding silly and, well, bureaucratic here, but in a fundamental sense he's exactly right. The president gave a speech about the democracy agenda, but he never put a democracy agenda together." Saying that "policy emerges from interagency meetings," does sound hopelessly bureaucratic, but good solid policy in fact does -- as opposed to the airy concepts that are laid out in speeches (which, of course, ought to form the basis of good policy).

And I'd go a couple of steps further:

• First, this variant of the "blame the bureaucracy" theme is a very convenient and effective tool for politicians. Indeed, Baker's lead to the story has President Bush referring to himself as a "dissident" within his own government when trying to explain slow progress on his initiative to a gathering of opposition leaders from various authoritarian countries. That's like saying you'd love to play golf with your buddies on Saturday morning, but your wife just won't let you.
• Second, this is typical of the kind of blame-shifting that occurs at the end of presidential administrations. "Look," administration officials want to say, "it's not likely we didn't have big ideas, and we even tried to act on them. But the mean ol' bureaucracy got in the way." It's a way of preemptively deflecting criticism of their own actions (or lack thereof).

So President Bush says that the story that his watch was stolen when he glad-handed a crowd of Albanians is "ludicrous" and "unbelievable." In fact, the White House says, the president took his watch off before plunging into the crowd. But if it's "ludicrous" to imagine the watch would have been swiped, why did he take it off in the first place?

So on Mother's Day, my wife had only one request: That we go get some frozen yogurt after dinner at TCBY. I was more than happy to oblige. So I went to the TCBY Web site to use their handy store locator to find the nearest outlet -- and in no time found one that was pretty convenient. But it was one of the other listings in the results that caught my eye:

The White House
Eisenhower Exec. Office Bldg
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Rm404
Washington, DC 20502

The listing also included a phone number, and a call to it showed that it's not actually a TCBY franchise per se, and not a location that any old person can walk into for a yogurt fix: It's the White House mess.

What is it with President Bush and music lately? First he can't resist the urge to get up and dance with an African troupe at the White House. Then yesterday, at ceremonies commemorating the founding of Jamestown 400 years ago, he grabbed the baton from conductor JoAnn Falletta and took over leading an orchestra in a rendition of "Stars and Stripes Forever." Check out Falletta's diplomatic response when asked about the president's performance: "He was not shy about conducting at all. He conducted with a great deal of panache."