Many name Obama's lack of executive experience as a central source of the problem. Management experts knock Obama

After the HealthCare.gov debacle first exploded three months ago, President Barack Obama pleaded for people to cut him a little slack: “I wanted to go in and fix it myself, but I don’t write code.”

At his year-end news conference recently, he struck a different tone: “Since I’m in charge, obviously, we screwed it up.”


“We screwed it up” is not exactly the same thing as “I screwed it up.” Even so, those two quotes are mileposts on one of 2013’s biggest stories: Obama’s bumpy graduate-level education in management theory.

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A glitchy website and a wave of canceled plans gave Obama the worst headlines of his presidency in 2013, but at year’s end a range of management experts interviewed by POLITICO said a central question tended to get lost in the partisan firefight: To what extent do Obamacare’s early problems reflect the limitations, in experience and intellectual interest, of its namesake?

The heart of the issue, many of these people say, is that Obama and his inner circle had scant executive experience prior to arriving in the West Wing, and dim appreciation of the myriad ways the federal bureaucracy can frustrate an ambitious president. And above all, they had little apparent interest in the kind of organizational and motivational concepts that typically are the preoccupation of the most celebrated modern managers.

“No one asked you to write code or be a technical expert, but the expectation is you can set up a process,” said Kellogg School of Management professor Daniel Diermeier. “Companies do it every day.”

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The critiques from these experts also raise a broader issue: Historically, the presidency is a political office, or, at its best, what Franklin D. Roosevelt called “a position of moral leadership.”

Just two modern presidents came to the office identified primarily with large-scale organizational achievements: Dwight D. Eisenhower in World War II and Herbert Hoover for leading European famine relief after World War I. Hoover’s failure, in particular, damaged the notion that effective managers necessarily make effective presidents.

It is also a fact, however, that Obama came to office with less executive experience — precisely none — than any president since Gerald Ford.

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For nearly five years, this dearth didn’t seem to matter much. He responded with cool self-confidence during his first weeks in office, in the midst of a financial meltdown, continuing George W. Bush’s bank bailout and then passing his own $787 billion stimulus package. The raid that killed Osama bin Laden may not have been, as Vice President Joe Biden said, the most “audacious plan” in 500 years. But it certainly did not suggest, as the Obamacare rollout did, a president squinting Elmer Fudd-like to understand what was happening — and not happening — in the bowels of his own government about his most important domestic initiative.

“Where we’re seeing these costs are with the largest policy processes in the administration,” said John Hudak, a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. “So it’s easier to sort of smooth over or tuck away some of the small-ball managerial failures, but this is a really big one and one that requires a lot of managerial expertise and it just wasn’t there and it’s not there in the White House.”

Part of the process that was initially missing — and that came up repeatedly both in conversations with experts and in the broader public discourse — was the appointment of someone to play a “systems integrator” role, someone who could have had their hands in the guts of the website project day to day. Jeff Zients’s nomination to lead the website rescue effort, coming a few weeks into October, looked intended to close that gap.

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“Bringing those pieces together is at least half of the project, if not more than half of the project,” said Elizabeth G. Pontikes, an associate professor of organizations and strategy at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

The website has undoubtedly improved since its troubled launch on Oct. 1, and the White House has been working hard on a campaign to promote success stories pegged to the Wednesday kickoff of many Americans’ new insurance plans — a sign of optimism about the project and its management in the new year.

And the reporting on the run-up to implementation doesn’t suggest that the root cause was West Wing indifference or laziness. “The way I am attacking this is the way I attacked a lot of problems at the national security staff,” chief of staff Denis McDonough told The New York Times last summer about preparation for the rollout. He was said to be running war rooms filled with two dozen squad members and zealously distributing countdown calendars for the project.

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“History will judge the president’s management by the millions of Americans who got quality, affordable health care for the first time, didn’t have to worry about going bankrupt because someone in their family gets sick or never had to worry about being discriminated against for having a pre-existing condition — all thanks to the Affordable Care Act,” said White House spokesman Josh Earnest in an email.

But there is a difference between having meetings and knowing which questions to ask. There’s also a difference between inviting concerns to be raised and creating a climate where people involved in the project actually feel they can raise those concerns.

“Have you created an environment where it is not only OK, but it is rewarded to raise your hand early and say, ‘This worries me’?” one longtime management consultant said. “The worst technique that happens in a lot of organizations is it’s simply macho pressure. ‘Well, you gotta get it done.’ That feels good for about 30 seconds, then you’re back in deep sh—.”

Being a skilled practitioner of executive-branch power doesn’t necessarily demand the same skills as top executives in the private sector. But it does require knowledge that is hard to learn except through experience.

Obama’s first term included people with decades of executive-branch service. Pentagon chief Robert Gates ran the CIA in the 1990s after serving as deputy national security adviser (not to mention presiding over Texas A&M). He was replaced by Leon Panetta, who first worked in the Labor Department in the Nixon administration, served as budget director and chief of staff under Clinton, and also ran the CIA for Obama. Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, was celebrated in the Clinton years as a young White House aide for poking and prodding the executive branch agencies for good ideas to promote in the West Wing.

“I don’t need people in the executive branch who are project managers in tech … but I want them to know that we need to hire those people before we release the project,” said Craig Garthwaite, an assistant professor of management and strategy at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. “You’re building the ark after it started flooding.”

Working on a great campaign or two does not necessarily substitute for that kind of experience, either. “There’s enormous value placed, within the White House, upon winning and then getting legislation passed, and there’s less and less value placed upon executing the law itself,” said former presidential adviser David Gergen, now director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “This is not their asset. They are much, much better at campaigning and at the public microphones than they are in governing and in management.”

The debate about Obama’s management performance with the ACA rollout has become a refrain in the continual, low-level rivalry between Democratic camps close to Obama and to Bill and Hillary Clinton. Several sources with high-level Clinton administration experience drew pointed comparisons between Obamacare implementation and a Clinton-era success story: The government-wide response to make sure there were no widespread technological failures at the time of the once-feared Y2K computer rollover.

It’s hard to say what would have happened if that effort — closely monitored by then-White House chief of staff John Podesta, who just joined the Obama team, and then-National Security Adviser Sandy Berger — had received only perfunctory preparation. And Clinton had his share of outright management struggles, not least of all on health care. As it was, two people involved in the Y2K prep effort went on to higher profiles: Dick Clarke, who became celebrated as one of the people in the federal government agitating most loudly about a likely terrorist strike before Sept. 11, and John Koskinen, whom Obama nominated to head the Internal Revenue Service.

One former government official said the Clinton camp’s Y2K comparisons are only partly fair. There was bipartisan commitment to heading off potential problems, something that is hardly the case with Obamacare. What’s more, there was recognition that if the worst Y2K fears came true, the implications would go beyond political embarrassment and included potential setbacks to national security and the economy.

Even so, the official said, Clinton did impose a culture of accountability in ways that Obama did not. There was apparently no single person, fully empowered by the president, lying awake at night knowing he or she would be blamed for anything that went wrong.

“The instincts don’t seem to be there quite as much” in this White House as in others, said Don Kettl, the dean of the University of Maryland school of public policy, who studies public management. “On the one side there’s not a whole lot of upside advantage to doing things well, but there sure is enormous political punishment for doing complicated things badly.”

Even as the George W. Bush administration’s own management shortcomings are well-understood — in matters both reactive (Hurricane Katrina) and proactive (Iraq) — Dick Cheney demonstrated effective West Wing management in one vital area. He was generally seen as successful in pushing his views through an often-adversarial executive branch, moving swiftly to install allies in key, sometimes low-profile, posts as he and Bush prepared to take office. “Cheney knew how to build an administration to his liking, and whispers were already spreading about who was really in charge,” Peter Baker recently wrote in his new book, “Days of Fire,” about that transition. “Bush was still figuring it all out.”

To listen to Obama discuss the rollout through the fall, he was still figuring out some of the finer points, too. If he had known healthcare.gov wasn’t going to work by its launch date, he said in mid-November, “I wouldn’t be going out saying, boy, this is going to be great.”

“In management circles, that’s an indictment,” said the longtime consultant. “How could you not know? And if no one told you, you’re still culpable for that too.”

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