Biden’s Staffing Fights Suggest a Healthy Party. By Jonathan Bernstein

Biden’s Staffing Fights Suggest a Healthy Party. By Jonathan Bernstein

bloomberg.com

4 min

Published on December 10, 2020, 7:38 AM EST

The best piece I’ve seen so far on President-elect Joe Biden’s cabinet-building is from Perry Bacon Jr. at FiveThirtyEight. I’ve written a few items about Biden’s personnel choices, but this one made me step back and think about the process a bit. What Bacon gets right is that putting together a cabinet and a White House staff — putting together a presidency — is more than anything an exercise in party politics.

Parties are made up of individuals and groups, who work together at times but also expend plenty of effort jockeying for internal influence. The most important venue of conflict is when the party nominates candidates, especially for president. After that, they come together to contest the general election. If they win, the internal posturing resumes. A new administration is in some ways just a human manifestation of all that maneuvering — which also gives outsiders a good sense of the outcomes.

Of course, this only applies to relatively functional parties and presidencies. Outsiders learned a lot about the 1980 Republican Party when Ronald Reagan selected his administration, and also learned how it had changed 20 years later when George W. Bush did the same. What we learned in 2016 and 2017 was that Donald Trump was impressed with uniforms, with people who flattered him, and with anyone who spent a lot of time talking on cable-news networks — and that a lot of Republicans didn’t care very much about who got most positions, so long as Trump was willing to select partisan judges and enact tax cuts.

Bacon’s analysis shows a party with organized groups based on demographics — a Black establishment, a Latino one and perhaps more than one group of women — as well as ideological factions. More specialized interest-based groups also have particular clout over the positions in their area.

What’s important is that none of this is new. The important groups change, but staffing a presidency has always been a balancing act. Sometimes it’s ethnic groups; sometimes it’s religious ones; sometimes various key states need to be given important posts. Even during the era of personalized presidents, in the 1960s and 1970s, party groups had some ability to influence cabinet picks.

In the old days of smoke-filled rooms, a lot of this stuff was negotiated along with the nomination. That’s long gone. Given today’s sprawling, decentralized party networks, one of the president’s more difficult jobs is to understand both the big-picture and smaller-picture state of the party, and to ensure the administration reflects which groups are important in which areas. At the same time, the president can use personnel choices to further his or her own policy preferences and priorities, at least within the limits the party sets.

The point is: What can appear to be a lot of fairly uninspiring demographic counting and interest-group griping, with the president-elect catering to one group after another, is actually the sign of a healthy party — and can tell us a lot about who that party really is. It can also tell us plenty about the new president’s skills, abilities that are less remarked on but generally a lot more important to governing than giving a good speech, winning a televised debate or having appealing campaign slogans.