Corporate credentials weigh down Bush's team
By Susan Page, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — When he took office, President Bush counted his corporate credentials and those held by his top aides as assets, evidence of an administration that would bring businesslike efficiency to government. Now, after a series of corporate scandals, those business backgrounds seem more like liabilities.
Bush: Questions have been asked about his role as a member of the board of directors at Harken Energy.
By Ron Edmonds, AP
"You don't hear anybody talking about their résumés anymore," says Paul Light, a political scientist at the Brookings Institution who studies presidential appointees. "Giants of corporate leadership and thinking have become poster children for corporate greed and manipulation."
The White House is being peppered with questions about President Bush's history at Harken Energy, where he was on the board of directors. Vice President Cheney's former company, energy services firm Halliburton, is being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for accounting changes made when he was CEO. Those controversies have complicated White House efforts to show the administration as credible in cracking down on corporate crime.
Then there are the economic problems worsened by the corporate scandals — a roiling stock market and sharp declines in consumer confidence — that have spotlighted weaknesses on Bush's economic team. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, whose candor when he was CEO of Alcoa was seen as refreshing, is now viewed as such a loose cannon that the White House has been reluctant to let him go on TV. When he finally appeared on NBC's Meet the Press last week, his offhand comment disparaging Brazil sent its currency tumbling and prompted a diplomatic protest.
And the unprecedented number of corporate executives appointed to key administration jobs, including four Cabinet members and the White House chief of staff, has reinforced the perception that Bush is too close to Corporate America. Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, the head of the administration's task force on corporate fraud, faces questions about his sale of Providian Financial stock soon after he chaired the company's audit committee and just before the stock price began to slide. SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt as a Wall Street lawyer represented top investment firms, leading accounting companies and their lobbying group. He has had to recuse himself more than two dozen times.
"It's like the polar opposite of his defense and foreign policy team," says Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg. "The defense and foreign policy team is seen as strong and diverse. It multiplies Bush's effectiveness on the world stage. Bush's economic team and his team of corporate appointments leave Bush standing alone because almost none of them add credibility to his presidency."
White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett says a corporate background remains an asset even as voters distrust particular CEOs. "The training and the expertise and the experience that one receives through their education or through practical experience are very important assets for somebody who's leading an organization, and in this case a country, to have," he says. "If you were to ask people, 'Do you think the federal government would benefit from the expertise of Bill Gates or Jack Welch,' most people would say yes."
In a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll taken July 26-28, an overwhelming 72% thought the experience Bush and Cheney had as corporate executives was a good thing. But the public was evenly split 42%-42% on whether it was a good idea or a bad one for a president to have former corporate executives in key jobs.
By almost 3-to-1, 69%-to-24%, they said Big Business has too much influence over decisions made by the Bush administration.
That has created a political opening that Democrats are eager to exploit. When Cheney headlined a fundraising lunch in Iowa last week for Republican Rep. Jim Leach, Democrats organized a demonstration outside featuring a man in a fat suit and a pig head dubbed "Hallibacon." Organizers say the faux porker will be back when Bush campaigns in Iowa next week.
Even before Enron filed for bankruptcy protection, WorldCom imploded and the executives of Adelphia were led away in handcuffs, the former CEOs in the Bush administration were getting mixed reviews. Some of the traits that helped make them successful corporate leaders — including a take-no-prisoners leadership style — have contributed to controversies in their government jobs.
Two of the most serious confrontations between the White House and Congress reflect the clash between a corporate culture and a government one:
White House hopes of signing into law a Department of Homeland Security by the Sept. 11 anniversary of the terrorist attacks have been stalled by a dispute over whether the department's 50,000 employees will have civil service protections. Bush threatens to veto the bill, which gives him almost everything else he asked for, if it doesn't include a waiver to provide the "managerial flexibility" that is standard in much of the business world.
But Senate Governmental Affairs Chairman Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., and other Democrats say the workplace rules are a fundamental protection for employees, and federal law already allows the president to make exceptions on national-security grounds. Lieberman calls the president's stand "a partisan ideological sideshow."
The White House and Congress are in an unprecedented courtroom battle over whether Congress' investigative arm, the General Accounting Office, can demand the names of industry leaders and others who met with Cheney's energy task force last year. Cheney refuses to disclose the names, describing the issue as a matter of constitutional principle and presidential authority. But some White House aides privately describe Congress' demand — which would be unheard of in the corporate world — as unremarkable. In 1992, Hillary Rodham Clinton reluctantly bowed to demands from congressional Republicans to release the names of those who met with her health care task force.
"Their leadership style is one of CEOs who can make the decisions and not have to answer to anybody," says Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif. "They certainly don't want to be second-guessed by such lowly types as elected members of the House and Senate."
Even Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who has gotten high marks for leading the war on terrorism, faced criticism before then for alienating generals, defense contractors and members of Congress because of the way he put together a defense overhaul plan. His approach, they said, was high-handed and secretive — the sort of approach he might well have taken as CEO of G.D. Searle and General Instrument.
CEOs generally are able to hire and fire workers, set budgets and implement sometimes-ruthless policies to improve the bottom line. They generally are judged by Wall Street and answerable only to a board of directors. But if CEOs are masters of their universe, top government officials are more like herders of other people's cats. They must rely on powers of persuasion to get competing players to move in the same general direction, usually slowly and often in fits and starts.
For corporate-titans-turned-presidential-appointees, that means there are some difficult facts of life to learn. They're no longer the boss; the president is. Congress controls the purse strings, a sort of 435-member board of directors — about half of it controlled by the opposition. And the press scrutiny can be relentless.
"You have layers and layers of involvement that no one at the corporate level ever has," says former Commerce secretary Bill Daley, who is now president of SBC Communications. "For a CEO who's never been around that, to find that Chairman X of a congressional committee or the chairmen of six committees have a lot more to say than you about what happens in your department is frustrating and difficult."
Some corporate executives are notably successful in government. In the Clinton administration, former Goldman Sachs head Robert Rubin was generally rated an outstanding Treasury secretary. In the Bush administration, Commerce Secretary Don Evans, former CEO of energy services firm Tom Brown, is emerging as an economic spokesman. Budget director Mitch Daniels, a former senior vice president at Eli Lilly, is credited by top White House officials for taking heat for Bush from congressional appropriators.
Daniels, who was political director in the Reagan White House, acknowledges that the two worlds are different — and some execs never make the transition.
"Some folks don't have the patience to assemble the consensus or coalition that it takes to move things forward," Daniels says. They can be frustrated by a lack of clear results and "flummoxed" by congressional opposition to steps they see as critical. Success in government can be impossible for old-style executives who are used to giving orders, he says.
There can be stumbles even by those who had government experience before they became corporate executives, then returned to government jobs. Cheney and Rumsfeld both had long Washington résumés — as members of Congress, White House chiefs of staff and Defense secretaries — before becoming CEOs.
But in the years they were gone from Washington, the capital's partisan politics became more pitched and the press more aggressive. One official who has moved in both circles say it's also easy to catch "CEO disease," with its assumption that the corporate world's power and perquisites will follow you forever.
Philip Romero has observed both worlds, as a top aide to former California governor Pete Wilson and now as the business dean at the University of Oregon. "Being a CEO," he says, "is usually a lot simpler."
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