Also from today’s Morning Jolt:

The PR-Obsessed Presidency and Governmental Competence
The Los Angeles Times’s Doyle McManus:
The Secret Service can’t protect the White House. Public health authorities can’t get their arms around a one-man Ebola outbreak. The army we trained in Iraq collapsed as soon as it was attacked by Islamic extremists, and our own veterans can’t get the care they need at VA hospitals. And, lest we forget, it was only a year ago that the White House rolled out its national health insurance program, only to see its website grind to a halt.
Before making a useful point, McManus rather easily swallows this explanation for the cavalcade of incompetence and failure:
One basic problem, [public-policy scholar Linda Bilmes] said, is that the federal government’s personnel system is mired in antiquated civil service rules. “You can’t move people around; you can’t pay more to retain your best people; you can’t easily get rid of people you need to get rid of.” Additionally, she noted, “the pay at the top of the scale is inadequate to attract the best and the brightest into government, and as the old saying goes, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. It’s very demoralizing.”
But fixing those problems won’t be easy, if only because doing so would require bipartisan cooperation in Congress — and increasing the salaries of federal bureaucrats, even if that would make for better management, isn’t a popular cause in either party.
Really?
Even if “the pay at the top of the scale” isn’t enough for “the best and brightest,” let’s observe that federal workers get two humongous perks compared to their private-sector workers: First, their benefits, particularly pensions and health-care plans, are stable and generous:
In a telephone press briefing in August, Sheldon Friedman, the chairman of OPM’s Federal Prevailing Rate Advisory Committee, said the data doesn’t exist to compare benefits. However, he added: “Certainly it is true on average the benefits in the federal government are superior to the average for the private sector workforce, but that workforce include many millions who probably have no benefits whatsoever.”
More than 21,000 retired federal workers enjoy pensions of more than $100,000 per year.
Secondly, federal-government workers are very, very, very rarely laid off.
Yes, you don’t see a lot of millionaires working for the government. But you also see a lot of high five-figure and low six-figure jobs. (Allegedly nearly more than 450,000 federal workers make more than $100,000.) The federal government isn’t where you go work if you want to become wealthy, but it is a place to go work if you want to make what most Americans would consider to be a good living.
The idea that government incompetence would go away if we just paid them better is the sort of idea . . . eh, who am I kidding, you saw this plug coming a mile away.
Now, on to the useful point in McManus’s column:
Elaine Kamarck, another Clinton administration veteran now at the Brookings Institution, is tougher on President Obama . . .
The clearest proof: “They keep getting surprised by stuff. And the surprise is almost worse than anything else. It conveys the sense that the White House doesn’t know what its own government is doing.” . . .
“Today, presidents travel nonstop and talk nonstop,” she said. “That wasn’t always true. This addiction to PR has been terrible for the presidency. Every hour he’s on the campaign trail is an hour he could be talking with members of Congress. My advice to any president would be: Stop talking. Start working.”
The term “addiction to PR” is a good, brief way to characterize the way this administration goes about its job.
The recent Ken Burns documentary about the Roosevelts featured a striking moment from early in World War Two, where President Roosevelt felt the need to prepare the American public for bad news to come:
We have most certainly suffered losses — from Hitler’s U-boats in the Atlantic as well as from the Japanese in the Pacific — and we shall suffer more of them before the turn of the tide. But, speaking for the United States of America, let me say once and for all to the people of the world: We Americans have been compelled to yield ground, but we will regain it. We and the other United Nations are committed to the destruction of the militarism of Japan and Germany. We are daily increasing our strength. Soon, we and not our enemies will have the offensive; we, not they, will win the final battles; and we, not they, will make the final peace.
That’s from FDR’s fireside chat of February 23, 1942. Did we, the American public, lose our ability to hear bad news from our presidents? Or did our presidents lose the courage to tell us the bad news, preferring to hope we’ll miss the hard truths in a fog of gauzy promises and happy talk?
Also note this section about the public and the government trusting each other about information:
Your Government has unmistakable confidence in your ability to hear the worst, without flinching or losing heart. You must, in turn, have complete confidence that your Government is keeping nothing from you except information that will help the enemy in his attempt to destroy us. In a democracy there is always a solemn pact of truth between Government and the people; but there must also always be a full use of discretion and that word “discretion” applies to the critics of Government, as well.
This is war. The American people want to know, and will be told, the general trend of how the war is going. But they do not wish to help the enemy any more than our fighting forces do; and they will pay little attention to the rumor-mongers and the poison peddlers in our midst.
Does the American government still have “unmistakable confidence” in Americans’ ability to hear the worst?
The skill set you need to get elected president is completely different from the skill set you need to be a successful president. But if we really want a federal government to return to something resembling basic competence in the near future, we should consider the candidates’ ability to manage something larger than their own campaigns.