Paper Avalanche Often Set Off by Desire for Top Jobs, or ‘Plums’ : Barrage of Free Advice Awaits Next President

The phenomenon was first noticed in 1952. When President Harry S. Truman announced that he would not seek reelection, the two candidates trying to succeed him were buried in an avalanche of paper from those who had jobs to seek and ideas to sell.

“A respectable civil servant, college professor or civic reformer,” wrote a Princeton University professor, “would have been less embarrassed to appear in public without his trousers than without his proposal for the consideration of the new Administration.”

The phenomenon persists in 1988. By all accounts and evidence, in fact, the avalanche this election year is more massive than ever.

A host of formidable study groups--one even headed by former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald R. Ford--are preparing detailed policy papers to deliver to the President-elect and his advisers soon after Election Day.

Scholars have been submitting papers for many months to the staffs of both candidates, hoping to influence the campaigns and, perhaps more importantly, win a place for their ideas and themselves in the next Administration.

Prestigious quarterlies and op-ed pages of major newspapers brim with articles from experts who may sit behind imposing desks in Washington after Jan. 20.

The outpouring of wordage is encouraged by the nature of this year’s election, only the 7th in the 20th Century without an incumbent President on the ballot. But some skeptics question the wisdom and worth of so many hours spent churning out reports for the next President.

“The bipartisan reports will not influence anyone,” said Herb Berkowitz, public affairs director of the solidly conservative Heritage Foundation, which is producing an unabashedly partisan report. “They will be mush.”

Reflecting the prevailing view that the Carter presidential transition team failed to select the right people and policies for his first months in office, Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution derided the idea that more reports and proposals could have made a difference.

“If you had had all the reports in the world, and a bipartisan commission headed by President Eisenhower and President Truman to recommend what they should do, it would not have helped the Carter transition,” Hess said.

But the production of ideas and papers has its staunch defenders. Stuart E. Eizenstat, who worked on the Carter transition and is a project director for the new task force headed by Carter and Ford, said: “I would have found it useful to know what previous presidents of both parties proposed.”

Driving the authors of all of this year’s reports and articles is the experience of 1980, when the Heritage Foundation took a gamble before that election and prepared a massive prospectus for conservative government. Once Ronald Reagan was elected, his transition team adopted the report as a bible of conservatism that set the tone for the first years of the Administration.

“That turned the Heritage Foundation from a kooky right-wing outfit into a respectable organization,” said Robert Borosage of the rival and leftist Institute for Policy Studies.

In a similar way, an article by Jeane J. Kirkpatrick in the November, 1979, issue of Commentary has excited the ambitions of political scientists. Kirkpatrick, then a professor at Georgetown University, attacked Carter for trying to undermine right-wing but pro-American dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere.

Reagan, handed the article by campaign foreign policy adviser Richard V. Allen, welcomed her thesis that right-wing dictatorships are far easier to liberalize than left-wing dictatorships. Reagan enlisted Kirkpatrick in the campaign and then named her ambassador to the United Nations.

In this electoral season, the outpouring of ideas has come in three waves.

In the first, advisers to the candidates churned out scores of position papers--an exercise that strikes Borosage as of little value except to the authors. Borosage, a political analyst who worked as an adviser to Jesse Jackson, insists that neither the candidates nor their top staff have time during a campaign to read reports and briefings.

“The papers that they submit are like resumes,” he said. “The 100 or so people who have submitted them are likely to end up with policy-making jobs.”

Dennis Ross, a foreign policy adviser to Republican presidential candidate George Bush, acknowledged that perhaps a quarter of the papers were aimed less to influence the campaign than the future Administration. “A lot of the papers that come in that are geared to the future are . . . from job claimants,” he said.

The second wave of ideas, powered by the Kirkpatrick syndrome, has turned up in newspapers and distinguished journals.

The most recent issues of the quarterlies Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, for example, feature articles by Graham T. Allison Jr., dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government; Joseph S. Nye Jr., director of the Kennedy School’s Center for Science and International Affairs, and William D. Rogers, a former assistant secretary of state. All three are looked on as leading candidates for the most important foreign policy posts in any Administration of Democratic candidate Michael S. Dukakis.

Associate Editor Thomas Omestad of Foreign Policy, apologizing to the author of an article that was rejected for publication, explained: “We have been deluged with material because of the election. Everyone is thinking of getting his pet issue before the new Administration.”

The final wave of paper, based on the Heritage Foundation model, may be the most overpowering. A dozen or so institutions, foundations and special task forces are preparing lengthy documents for the future President, most for delivery soon after Election Day.

The goal is to shape the new President and his advisers during the transition to the new Administration, presumably the most malleable phase. “The new Administration is like an amoeba,” said Eizenstat, “and the transition is the first time that it starts to take shape.”

As it did in 1980, Heritage will offer the next President--it hopes he will be Bush--a conservative prospectus. “I am not so foolish to believe that, if Dukakis wins, our report will become the bible of the new Administration,” said a smiling Phil Truluck, Heritage’s executive vice president.

A liberal prospectus will come from the Democracy Project, a group headed by New York Democrat Mark Green. Reports are due as well from organizations with special concerns, including the Coalition for Women’s Appointments and Blueprint for the Environment.

The Center for Excellence in Government will soon issue what it calls “The Prune Book”--a detailed analysis of the qualifications that it believes the President should look for in filling the top 116 jobs in the federal government. (The center derives the book’s name from the so-called “plum book”, the directory of the several thousand jobs--political plums--that the President may fill directly.)

The new book is based on the experience of 350 people who once served in the 116 posts, and as John Trattner, its author, explained: “A prune is a plum with experience.”

The Roosevelt Center for American Policy Studies had planned a television series in which Bush and Dukakis would separately reply to questions from ordinary citizens. But when Bush refused to take part, the center gave up the plan and concentrated instead on preparing a report for the President-elect on the questions raised by people at various center-sponsored forums.

Two imposing bipartisan commissions--the American Agenda, headed by Carter and Ford, and the National Commission on the Public Service, headed by former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul A. Volcker--have aroused high expectations.

The American Agenda has promised to identify some crucial problems facing the new President and propose ways of dealing with them.

The Volcker commission, which will not complete its work until next February, decided to issue some preliminary pronouncements at a news conference in mid-October in an effort to influence the transition. It called, for example, on the new President to reduce the number of political appointments and put more top positions under the civil service.

The response from the presidential candidates did not augur well for this year’s avalanche of paper. Though polite, spokesmen for both Bush and Dukakis sounded lukewarm about the prospects that the new President would give up some of the plums--or prunes--that he can offer his political supporters.