Help Wanted: GOP Managers

It seems that the Republican Party, the business party, the party of management, has a lot of difficulty managing. Our government cannot execute the basic plays. Let's look past Katrina, and FEMA, and Michael Brown. Let's look past the mismanagement of the oil and gas leases out West, the FDA's bungling over Guidant and its appointment (subsequently retracted) of a veterinarian to head the Office of Women's Health. Let's just consider the new Medicare drug program. The Bush Administration can't even perform a simple thing like getting people off the state Medicaid computer list and onto the Medicare computer list. In 2004 there was a serious shortage of flu vaccine. John Kerry failed to make an issue of it, but the voters should have been alarmed. It was an omen of the bungling to come in New Orleans. This is a government that cannot do even simple things.

It appears that the Republicans when in power have no good managers. In an economy of superstars who make millions, the GOP can't afford to hire them, especially the ones who are indifferent to public service and gravitate to the Republicans in the first place--or to no party at all. Three decades ago the average pay of CEOs of the hundred biggest American corporations was a mere $1.3 million. By 2000 the average pay had climbed to $37.5 million. One can see why the old Republican well-to-do, like Henry Stimson or C. Douglas Dillon, are no longer in government. By contrast, this summer who will still remember John Snow, who is soon to be our former Treasury Secretary?

What may be more crippling to Bush's efforts to recruit people is not the CEO pay but the pay of the vice presidents just below them. That's where the government might look for talent to manage at the assistant secretary level. But it is questionable how many of these managers can afford public service--for a year perhaps, but not for three or four, much less two presidential terms. A friend of mine in a top-rank job at a huge global firm told me of a colleague of his in a rising American company. The colleague was now head of personnel, or human relations. "And do you know what his salary is?" my friend told me. "It's $5 million a year."

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