You Won, Now What?

In the following Memorandum written to newly elected officials and their staffs by Taegan Goddard and Chris Riback, they lay out their ideas, as to what should be done by these officials to ensure that the needs of the people are met and that good government is established and adhered to. The points laid out in their memo are basic and realistic goals that all levels of government can follow, whether it's on the Municipal, County or State level, or up to the Federal.

Taegan Goddard and Chris Riback are co-authors of "YOU WON - NOW WHAT? How Americans Can Make Democracy Work from City Hall to the White House" (Scribner, 1998). Goddard has served as a policy advisor to a U.S. Senator, Governor and State Treasurer. Riback has worked as a journalist for "60 Minutes," ABC News, and the Associated Press.

Memorandum

TO: Newly Elected Officials and Their Staffs

FROM: Taegan Goddard and Chris Riback

Congratulations! The polls are closed, the votes were tallied and you came out on top! With the hard weeks of campaigning barely over, you must remember that the election was not the finish line, it's the starting gun. The tough job of governing lies ahead.

Former House Speaker Tip O'Neill may have said it best: "It's easier to run for office than to run the office."

The reality for today's newly elected officials and their staffs is little different than the fiction portrayed in the 1972 film, The Candidate. Robert Redford starred as an idealist running for U.S. Senate. He never worried much about his campaign promises, because he never thought he would actually win. So when he did, the candidate turned to his manager and asked the question the campaign left him completely unprepared to answer: "What do we do now?"

Like Redford's character, the winners of yesterday's election must now put their campaign promises into action. It's not easy because winning a campaign is very different than running a government. The elected and appointed officials swept into our governments after the elections may find it hard to get the simplest things accomplished. A different approach is needed.

"We campaign in poetry, but when we're elected, we're forced to govern in prose," former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo once said.

Turning a poet into a novelist isn't always easy. But that was our goal as we started to write YOU WON - NOW WHAT? How Americans Can Make Democracy Work from City Hall to the White House. We traveled from coast to coast -- from Connecticut to California -- interviewing officials at all levels of government to learn how they make our democracy work. From this extensive research, we identified the "Eight Traits of Highly Effective Public Officials." We show what others have done. These are the rules of effective governing, rarely passed down from one generation of public servants to the next. This is the unwritten code of getting something done in government -- and possibly making the history books.

Recognize government is not a business.
This concept, of course, runs contrary to nearly everything said, written or thought about government today. Officials at all levels of government and from both major political parties cloak themselves in this Holy Grail of political theory. Yet from the idea that citizens are much more than government's customers (they are it's owners) to the need for openness, government is not a business. Forcing government managers into private sector thinking usually causes more problems than it solves.

Rethink government's main purpose.
If a government function can be run like a business, maybe it should be one. Congress regularly funds agencies headed by new public officials who find the day-to-day work goes beyond what they expected. With management teams swept in and out over the years, most agencies perform tasks they should not. Some government functions are more appropriate for the private sector, some overlap with other agencies and some are simply no longer relevant. By using up time and energy, these excesses keep the officials from doing their best job.

Know what they want to accomplish.
Little could sound more obvious. After all, who would run for office or accept appointment to an important government position without having a clear idea of what to achieve or how government should perform? Yet stop a random public official in the halls of the Capitol and too often you'll find they lack what President George Bush called "the vision thing."

Change the old guard, the old culture - or both.
Putting one's stamp on a government agency - or even a legislative office - is never easy. Staff positions must be filled with people who share similar goals, even when too few vacancies are available. And new positions are difficult to create. The pay typically runs lower than comparable private sector jobs; and new public officials - lacking any similar experience - must negotiate the political appointments minefield, especially when higher-ups put on pressure to take their unqualified cousin for that last vacancy.

Take control of the bureaucracy.
Empowering bureaucrats is today's conventional wisdom in making government work. It is also wrong. Instead, top new public officials must learn to empower themselves. They must liberate themselves from the multiple layers of bureaucracy and arcane rules that block their ability to take control of their agency. The elected or appointed public manager is most directly accountable to the citizens and, as a result, should have the most responsibility.

Juggle many balls at once.
If there is one supreme lesson of which nearly every public official wishes he or she had been reminded before taking office, it's that time is short, and much of their time is taken by juggling crises. The crises can develop slowly, like a recession that decreases government revenues; or they can appear out of nowhere, like a scandal plastered on the front page of the morning newspaper. But make no mistake - they will come.

Manage their message.
A government official's communication skills are frequently overlooked. They're not taught in public administration programs or business schools, nor are they mentioned in the so-called management books. Yet regularly they make the difference between success and failure in public sector initiatives. If public officials do not manage their message, it will be managed for them.

Seek feedback from citizens.
American democracy, like most democracies worldwide, has evolved into a system called "representative government," which, in plain language, means, "Elect me. I know better." But times have changed. No longer is it sufficient to take office and check back four years later to see if you've done a good job.

Technology has changed government. Feedback is so easy to get, from constantly whirring fax machines to the lightening-quick responses of e-mail, that no public official can ignore it. They have a responsibility not just to put information out but to get input in return.

This does not mean that public servants should change voting positions with every new e-mail they receive. Without a core set of beliefs, any government official is worthless. It does mean, however, the concept of representative democracy has evolved, and officials ignore a willing public at great risk.

What World Needs From US: Economic meltdown, climate change top list of things that are in need of global dialogue

by Mitch Potter - The Toronto Star
MEMORANDUM:
TO: PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
FROM: THE WORLD

We know you are not quite there yet. Whatever. The rest of the planet now has concluded you will be. Your honeymoon suite awaits with a euphoria that spans the globe.

A word of warning, however, before you snuggle in for that first group hug. There are bedbugs. And they bite.

A year of rising expectations is about to fall on your shoulders, with a thundering weight many now predict will buckle you.

Here in London, Simon Jenkins of the Guardian nailed the point, announcing the end of the bull market in Barack.

"Sell Obamas now," Jenkins advised his readers. "They are overpriced and the forward market has gone crazy. If he becomes president, the bubble will burst, I guess in the spring of next year."

Your era will begin with some immediate international advantages, it is true. Not least, the sheer glee that your name is not George.

"The first thing the world needs from America is the absence of George W. Bush," is how François Heisbourg, director of the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Studies, framed things in an interview with the Star. "That guarantees a tremendous advantage. And for Obama - I assume it will be him - it will be all the greater."

How bloated are the expectations? On the waterfront in Barcelona today, artist Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada and an army of volunteers are shaping a mountain of sand, earth and gravel into a giant portrait of you. This is not a joke.

"The piece is ephemeral, it is not designed to last," Rodriguez-Gerada told the Daily Telegraph, explaining the artwork, titled "Expectation," is intended not as praise for you but rather, as a commentary on how desperately the world lusts for the idea of you.

"Who knows if the euphoria surrounding Obama will fade away like sand or lead to something more permanent?"

Many anticipate your first step will be to reboot America's conversation with the world. A kind of "great cleansing," in the words of Charlie Beckett, director of POLIS, the journalism think-tank at London School of Economics.

"Right now there is an enormous residual 'turning off' when Americans speak. The feeling is that during the Bush era, 'They caused mayhem, they ignored the world, they didn't listen to us - so why should we listen to them.'

"Now the conversation will renew. Which is tremendously important for the world. Especially for those of us who believe in America's place in the world as a force for democracy and freedom."

That, of course, is the easy part, given your deft oratorical skills. But the going is almost certainly going to get messy soon thereafter, when talk collides with realpolitik. As Heisbourg notes, "America's national interest is not going to change just because the president changes."

We got a sense of this in Berlin earlier this summer. Up there on stage, all you could see was a throng of 200,000 people chanting your name. But where we were, down in the crowd, we felt a distinct chill when you spoke of a stepped-up effort in war-weary Afghanistan - a conflict that Germans have just about had their fill of. And the rest of Europe is not far behind.

But Afghanistan may in fact prove the least of your worries, given the cluster of global crises on your morning-after to-do list. Global economic meltdown, far and away, trumps them all. Yet the interconnected issues of climate change and energy burn close behind.

Add to that the whole series of other urgent global challenges, from bioethics to migration to nuclear proliferation, and the task ahead wildly exceeds the bounds of a single brain, even one as well-appointed as yours.

Where to begin? Many of your unofficial global advisers suggest the only way forward is a Herculean act of multitasking. You need to dispatch individual teams on every one of these problems, each with marching orders to map how the United States can lead in crafting - and crucially,obeying - a new global rulebook.

Take solace in two important facts as you go forward. First, know that for now, at least, your name is the gold standard of global goodwill. People want you to succeed. And, most importantly, know that however ridiculous the expectations may be, nobody truly expects you to have the all the answers.

"One of the ways to manage unrealistic expectations is to recognize that the United States doesn't have to do everything. It doesn't have to solve all the problems. It just needs to be a constructive global player," said Ian Goldin, director of the James Martin 21st Century School at Oxford University.

Goldin, a former World Bank vice president, said the next leader's greatest challenge would be to rise above national self-interest. To see the global forest despite the domestic trees, and to understand that what is good for the world will, ultimately, be very good for the U.S.

"It comes down to a question of accepting there will be global rules and to abide by them. The problem with a superpower is that when the world shows you the red card, do you accept the red card or do you play the global bully?" said Goldin.

"That's why there is so much optimism today. There is a view that the United States now will not only participate very actively in establishing the rules of the game. But also they will be responsible players."
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