So says New York University professor and federal bureaucracy expert Paul Light in a Washington Post analysis piece about the change from George W. Bush to Barack Obama. Bush, who might be the worst president since reconstruction, hands over 2-3 endless wars (not sure how you count the "war on terror"), a financial crisis and economic recession, trillion-dollar deficits and the entire federal regulatory structure in tatters (When was the last time the Environmental Protection Agency or Food and Drug Administration or Occupational Safety and Health Administration were so toothless?).

Light tries to distill the mammoth work ahead into three immediate challenges: appoint the 3,000 political appointees super fast, get a strong chief of staff who can filter and narrow the range of opinions offered by these appointees, and privilege more immediate actions (revising the tax code) over sweeping ones (a new New Deal).

Light may provide a good model here for the Obama administration. But what’s interesting in reading his three recommendations is that the first two at least are exactly what you didn’t want George W. Bush to do. Bush was historically slow at making political appointees (hundreds of top positions were still unfilled on 9/11), but when he did appoint people it was often someone unqualified for the job (like Mike Brown at FEMA) or against the very mission of the agency he lead (like Harold Stratton at the Consumer Product Safety Commission).  The country got in trouble when Congress, in deference to the president’s right to appoint executive leaders, waved folks like Brown and Stratton through.

Also, one of the Bush administration’s fatal flaws was the small cocoon of advisers who decided everything from the need to invade to Iraq to the torture of "enemy combatants."  The overwhelming scope of the country’s national security and economic problems requires swift action, but not if figures akin to Paul Wolfowitz or David Addington are driving that action.

Finally, I think the immediate actions v. sweeping overhauls argument is an academic one at this point. It is already being bandied about by sensible D.C. moderates warning the Democrats not to get too greedy with Obama and clear Congressional majorities. The truth is that, unlike Bill Clinton, Obama could not be able to have a "small presidency" if he wanted to. He will be a weak leader if he doesn’t make immediate decisions about Guantanamo Bay and what the endgame is in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the case of Guantanamo and the "war on terror," Bush illegally expanded the scope of executive power. It will be an immediate moral challenge for the Obama presidency to make the executive branch once again follow the law.-MB

Not big government, and not small government:  government that works.  Government in an administration where the public sector is respected and the private sector is seen as a partner rather than a paragon.  Government that sees our country’s problems as challenges to be overcome, not opportunities to seek political advantage.  Government as a cooperative project between the elected and those who elected them.  Along with everything else that is inspiring and exciting about the victory of Barack Obama comes a great opportunity for all these things to come to pass.  This election is an opportunity, for the first time in a generation, for the federal government to become a source of initiative, of hope, of change we can believe in.

Ned Hodgman