A quick note from the "this should be obvious" department: policies and personnel both matter. It is not either / or. One is not wholly dependant upon the other.
If personnel did not matter, and only the policies of the President mattered, then there would be no need for any President to appoint anyone new in the federal government. Obama would not need to fire anyone in the Bush administration, except Bush himself. Before that, Bush would have not needed to fire anyone in the Clinton administration. And Clinton would not have needed to fire anyone from Bush Sr.'s administration. Etc.
Personnel is obviously important, in and of itself. The two main reasons for this are as follows:
- Advice: Senior White House staff and cabinet appointees are the closest advisors of the President. These are the people who will be in the room with soon-to-be President Obama when the big decisions on policy and strategy are made. What they say in these meetings, and the perspectives they bring with them to these meetings, will therefore play a role in how policy and strategy are shaped during the Obama administration.
- Implementation: The federal government is absolutely enormous, with a budget roughly ($2.73 Trillion in 2007, according to wikipedia) equal to the economy of the United Kingdom (2.73 Trillion in 2007, according to the World Bank). Something this large cannot be micromanaged by any one individual, as the President is not the Borg Queen. The actual daily management of the federal government, as well as the implementation of the President's polices, will be overseen by individuals who simply cannot, and will not, act as a perfect simulacrum of the inside of President Obama's mind. As such, the ideological predilections, and indeed even personalities, of the people appointed to run the federal government matter a great deal in how the government will operate.
Now, this is not to argue that Obama's policies don't matter. Of course they matter, and arguing otherwise would be just as inane as arguing that personnel don't matter. If policy didn't matter, then we would never need a new President. If personnel didn't matter, than we would never need new people to work for the President. The point is that policy and personnel both matter, and that they both matter independently of each other. The people hired to run the federal government will have to follow Obama's policies. At the same time, the people hired to run the federal government will have a lot of say over exactly how Obama's policies are followed, and also over the formulation of new policies. Both policy and personnel matter quite a darn bit. One does not subsume the other.
Right now, during the transition, Obama is not making a lot of policy. Certainly, policy planning and drafting is taking place, but there is not a single piece of legislation that the Obama administration has crafted and sent before Congress. Instead, the main news right now when it comes to the Obama administration are his staff and cabinet appointments. Those hires are being made right now. As such, currently personnel is at the forefront of the news, not policy.
That, of course, will not always be the case. In fact, once Obama is sworn in and then over the next four years, policy discussions will almost always dominate. There will be rare exceptions when major staff or cabinet changes need to be made, but almost all the time the focus will be on policy. When it comes to policy, I anticipate a fairly high level of agreement with the direction that Obama pursues.
That is all. Hopefully, this was already obvious to most people. I apologize to all of those people who already knew this. |
