Quote:And the community organizer with minimal (mostly campaigning) government experience was better prepared?

 

If you read this article and left with anything other than an overt bias against him, then I have beach-front property in Arizona that you'd love.

He may not have been prepared but the Bush Administration was helpful to both McCain and Obama running up to the election. It's obvious this didn't happen between the Obama Administration and Trump's people. It didn't have to happen with Clinton's since she was going to carry the torch Obama was going to hand off to her.

 

Top Obama Aide Recalls Tensions of 2008 Presidential Transition

 

"Best practices for running a change in administrations are frustratingly vague.
 
Hence the Obama White House planners, after Election Day 2012, found themselves mulling whether protocol required them to seek the resignations of Obama’s entire Cabinet. Then they realized, according to then-Cabinet Secretary Chris Lu, that they had all gleaned that “best practice” from an episode of TV’s “The West Wing.”
 
Lu, who ran Barack Obama’s 2008 transition team and is now deputy Labor secretary, on Wednesday recalled the tensions of executing the big changeover during a book signing at the National Academy of Public Administration for political scientist Martha Joynt Kumar’s new study “Before the Oath: How George W. Bush and Barack Obama Managed a Transfer of Power” (Johns Hopkins University Press).
 

The 2008 transition, Kumar said, “was the best in anyone’s memory, in part because 9/11 made everyone recognize that a transition is fragile time.” Its hallmark was that President George W. Bush worked with both Democratic candidate Barack Obama and Republican candidate John McCain beginning as early as the summer. Occasionally, “there were some harsh words from the Obama campaign about Bush, but people knew that was just part of the campaign,” Kumar said.

 

Lu described himself as “an accidental transition planner” who got the Washington job after other key Obama aides had moved to Chicago for the campaign. He said he and Obama were both inspired by the 1972 movie “The Candidate,” in which a pretty-boy novice politician played by Robert Redford won an upset victory and bewilderingly asked, “What do we do now?”
 
It’s nearly impossible to “put together a government transition in 77 days,” Lu said. So, as early as December 2007, Bush was in discussions with his chief of staff and in touch with both campaigns by summer of 2008. Lu set up quietly in a campaign office above a Subway sandwich shop “with no organized space or secure computers.” (Under a new law, the General Services Administration will now provide the office.) Former Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta provided leadership from the Center for American Progress, helping by making it clear he would not take a job with Obama, Lu said.
 
Before the election, both campaign staffs met with Bush Chief of Staff Josh Bolten to learn software, and read memoranda of understanding from agency review teams, and national security memos drafted by National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley with help from the Defense and State departments. “It was a cooperative environment,” Lu said, though once a McCain campaign staff member complained that Obama’s people were “measuring the drapes” before the election."
 
There is more to read. Interesting stuff.

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