04 December 2008
Governing Is Different From Campaigning
An Interview With Former Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley
A member of the cabinet under President Bill Clinton discusses the hectic days of transition and the process of stepping into a job as an agency head. Richard W. Riley spoke with eJournal USA’s Charlene Porter.
Richard Riley served as U.S. secretary of education from 1993 to 2001. He was governor of South Carolina from 1979 to 1987, and remains an ambassador for improving education in that state, in the nation, and abroad.
Q: What’s it like to get that phone call inviting you to join a new administration?
Riley: When it really started with me was a week or 10 days after Bill Clinton had been elected in 1992. I was out in Palo Alto, California, at a meeting of a commission on health care. We were working on the complex issues of health care and what ought to be done about them, and somebody leaned over to me and said, “Governor, you have a phone call.” I said, “How about getting a message? We’re in the middle of some complicated issues here.”
And they said, “Well, it’s the president-elect.” So I said, “Oh, well then, I’ll take the call.”
Q: You and Bill Clinton served as state governors at the same time, you in South Carolina, and he in Arkansas. Did that phone call arise from your shared history?
Riley: That’s right. He was a close friend of mine. We were governors at about the same time in very similar states in size, makeup, and demographics.
I was on his National Executive Committee when he was elected. Then he was asking me to head up the transition for the selection of personnel at the sub-cabinet level, to chair the group that dealt with all those positions just below the cabinet secretaries, and still very important positions. I agreed to do that, so my wife and I moved to Washington and set up residence there.
I headed up what started as a small group but quickly became 250 or 300 people, setting up all the mechanisms for receiving résumés and recommendations, dividing them up according to departments, et cetera. We had a group of personnel professionals who would analyze all the applicants, for example, under the Department of Education. Some days, we were getting more than 3,000 résumés. We had about 50 lawyers, all volunteers, who vetted the applicants after we narrowed it down to those we were going to send to the president to be considered.
After about a month or six weeks of that, the president-elect asked me to start meeting with him on a number of things, then told me he wanted me to be in the cabinet and offered me the secretary of education job. Education was my first love, so I accepted.
Then I had the confusing situation of trying to oversee what was happening with sub-cabinet appointments and trying to set up my department, while I was also worrying about my own confirmation and the confirmations of the other key people in the Department of Education.
It was a fascinating time for me, and one that I thoroughly enjoyed, but I worked more than 14 or 15 hours a day. That period is kind of a fog to me.
Q: Do you think that’s what Mr. Obama’s people are going through now?
Riley: The experience for President-elect Obama and his staff is much more planned and in order.
Three candidates ran for president in 1992, and President Clinton won with less than 50 percent of the vote. He’d been fighting the campaign right to the last day, and so had very little time to begin the process of appointments … prior to his election. When Senator Obama was elected, he already had people in place for a couple of months planning how they’d set up transition committees in the event he won. So they are more advanced than Clinton was.
It took Clinton some time to get settled in. He’s a very deliberative person, and he wanted to be careful about it, so it was the end of December before Clinton appointed any cabinet members. That was behind the curve. We would have been better off if we had had some period of time to plan for that.
So the situation is a little bit different for President-elect Obama than it was for us.
Q: Did that “behind-the-curve” position act as a disadvantage as the months unfolded in the Clinton administration?
Riley: It was a disadvantage for a short period of time, but President Clinton really couldn’t help it because the situation was so different from what you have now. President-elect Obama has all the Clinton administration experience to build on. He has pulled in many of Clinton’s people to be his advisors, transition people, and cabinet members. When Bill Clinton came in, there had not been a Democratic administration since Jimmy Carter [1977-1981]. So over a period of a good many years, there were very few young Democrats who had had the chance to serve in government. By 1992, they were anxious to do so. Those people were pouring in during the Clinton years, so Obama has had the benefit of being able to draw on that large pool of experienced people.
Q: The law requires that nominees for the secretary of education position undergo a confirmation hearing before the U.S. Senate. How did that go for you?
Riley: It’s always nerve-wracking. You don’t know what’s going to be asked. You might say the wrong thing and make a big deal out of a small deal. Fortunately, my two South Carolina senators had considerable seniority, and both were in favor of my nomination. One of them was a leading Democrat, Fritz Hollings, and one of them was a leading Republican, Strom Thurmond. They both were very supportive. Senator Thurmond went with me to every meeting I had with Republican members of the committee that would review my confirmation. Senator Hollings did the same thing with the Democratic members. I received unanimous support for my nomination.
So while it’s nerve-wracking and you spend a lot of time preparing for it, thinking about all the different kinds of questions you may get, in the end, for me, it turned out to be a very enjoyable day once I got to the hearing itself, with the members quizzing me on my views on education.
Q: You certainly had an advantage with support from a senior member of the opposing political party. Isn’t that unusual?
Riley: Yes. A lot of the people who were nominated by President Clinton had an experience where senators from the opposite party really quizzed them in a seriously negative way. That could make for a very long day.
The complexity of the hearing process was something I had to deal with in the transition job as leader for sub-cabinet personnel positions. We had some 250 positions to fill, and you’d get into some very, very complex situations.
For example, you’d have a candidate for a position in the Department of Justice or Education or whatever, a person who had an outstanding record, very positive references. Then, when the lawyers would go off and do the vetting, they’d come back and tell us this person had a drunk-driving charge 20 or so years ago after leaving a party, and that was on their record. So then you have this problem: Do you go forward with this outstanding person who has a perfectly clean record, other than this one thing? Is this enough to disqualify them from consideration for a presidential appointment?
Those were ticklish, sensitive situations.
They say it takes six to eight months to choose a college president in a national search. The sub-cabinet positions are the equivalent of college presidents, and a new president has 200 to 250 of them to fill. And you have to do that in a couple of months. It’s a very trying, but important, situation. Everybody tries to do it the best way they can, and it’s amazing how the American people come in and support those efforts.
Q: The first 100 days are always perceived as a critical period to set the tone of a presidency. But because of the crash in world markets that occurred in the last quarter of 2008, it’s almost as if the Obama administration had been sworn in early as the markets sought some signs of what he is planning to do. How does that compare with your experience?
Riley: We were not in the middle of a crisis in the Clinton years. President-elect Obama will take office in the middle of an economic crisis, in the middle of two wars, and other critical things going on. So he has enormous pressure to get his secretary of state, his national security advisors, and his economic advisors in place quickly.
Q: What do you recall about the first 100 days of the Clinton administration and the urgency of that period?
Riley: You do have a period where you can really get some things done coming out of a campaign, but you have to learn that governing is quite different from campaigning. Some people who go into the presidency and bring people around them, they’re really still campaigning. You need to develop this idea that now you’re the president of all the people.
When you’re in a campaign, you’re against the other side. That’s the system. Both sides are in that political mode. There’s nothing wrong with that, though we do have way too much negative campaigning going on now to suit me. But I was very proud of the Obama campaign, I thought he handled it in a very good way, and I think that’s one of the reasons he did well.
But coming out of that campaign mode, you really need to have a change of mind. You’re not against the other side at that point. You are for the country. You still have differences that develop. That’s our system. You have partisan issues, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But the way you approach all that is different once you are in office. Governing is different from campaigning.
From my observation, President-elect Obama understands that very well, and it looks to me like everything he’s done and said is from a governing posture instead of a campaigning posture. I think that’s very good with the crises he’s facing.
Q: Let’s go to the personal side of this experience for you. Joining an administration is more than a political or a career choice. There are also major lifestyle changes. For you it was a long-distance move to Washington from your home in Greenville, South Carolina, with all that entails, affecting you and your family. Was that a difficult transition for you?
Riley: It was not for me. I had a very understanding wife who enjoyed my government experiences as much as I did. She was a true partner in every sense of the word who, I’m sad to say, died in March 2008. She had breast cancer for some 25 years. She developed cancer in the early 1980s when I was governor. With good treatment and taking good care of herself, she had a very good life for 25 more years. She was a great partner for me, and threw right in with whatever I had to do.
But it is a change of your style of life in every way. For example, anything you own -- stocks, bonds, or whatever -- you all but have to get rid of or put into some kind of trust. That's a hassle. But I didn’t have that many assets to worry about, so I just transferred everything into holdings that were in no way controversial.
Also, you belong to all kinds of organizations. I used to say in speeches that I had to resign from everything but my church and my wife, and that was about the truth. With my interest in education, I was on a whole lot of boards and commissions. I was a trustee of the Duke University endowment, which I thoroughly enjoyed. But I had to resign from that. I had to resign from a number of other boards and commissions I was involved with in order to take the job as secretary of education. A nominee for that position has to resign from anything that has any relation to education whatsoever, and everything I belonged to did.
So you resign from everything you belong to. You sell everything you own except your home or automobile. You have to clear your holdings and your involvement to avoid any conflict of interest so you can go into this high position with the people’s power and trust.
Q: Was it worth it?
Riley: Yes, it was worth it completely. It was a lot of trouble, and a lot of things to work out and do, but we thoroughly enjoyed it. Of course, the president asked me to stay on for another four years after he was reelected in 1996, so I was there for eight years. I went to Washington for two months, and I stayed for two months and eight years.
I enjoyed every minute of it and my wife loved it, too. We have enormously good friends from all over the world we met [in Washington], and, of course, any number of people involved in education that I met every day — the most interesting people in the country and the world. I … wouldn’t take anything in the world for the experience. I will always be grateful to President Clinton for choosing me to be in that position.
Q: Your eight-year tenure was unusual. Generally most cabinet officers leave government after a few years of service. Why did you stay that long?
Riley: You may recall that presidents prior to Clinton had it in their plans to disband and eliminate a federal Department of Education. Because of that history, I saw when I took the job that many of the structural elements of the department were not up to date and were in serious need of improvement. I really threw myself into that and became very much involved -- getting a new computer system, which was complex and complicated because it had to handle all the transactions between the department and universities, school districts, students, and what have you. All of that business was being conducted by a relatively small department. I pulled in the best people in the country to serve in the department, and I was very pleased with that.
We were just getting the department going well. The president offered me several other, higher positions, which I did not want to take because I was so much into the Department of Education, and that’s where I wanted to stay. I had things going well at the end of four years, and I was excited about staying another four years.
Q: Are you offering any advice to the incoming Obama administration?
Riley: I’m serving as kind of an advisor to the education transition teams, and I’ve met with them and talked to them. There are a couple of different groups focused on the Department of Education, looking at the agency itself, its structure, and policies such as No Child Left Behind [an education initiative of the Bush administration]. I’ve talked to them and responded to questions about the agency, and they call periodically. I’m certainly available for anything they want to ask me, and I try to give them what I think is my best advice.
The opinions expressed in this interview do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
