After eight years of crisp, pro-active government (2-3 unending wars, a surplus turned into trillions of debt, an economy that gets more disastrous by the day, dormant regulatory agencies) probably a lot of people are worried that a Barack Obama or John McCain administration will not bring the same "execution" to the executive branch that the George W. Bush administration did. Well, the President hears you and yesterday he signed an executive order to create a transition council that will offer advice about how the next administration governs. White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten– with time on his hands since he’s not cooperating with a Congressional subpoena to turn over documents on the U.S. Atty. firings– will head the council.

As the Washington Post’s Dan Eggen points out, the transition council has a dark humor to it beyond just the historic incompetence of the Bush administration. Bush did a specifically awful job in his first year attending to holes in the bureaucracy. Perhaps still exhausted from round-the-clock efforts to prevent a recount in Florida, the president took months to name heads of federal agencies. Among the mountain of problems this lead to, the 9/11 commission noted that a hallowed out national security apparatus damaged efforts to prevent the 9/11 attacks. So, yeah, maybe Obama or McCain should take the transition council’s advice with a grain of salt.-MB

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