Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration and Harris campaign. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Eli | Email Lauren Programming note: West Wing Playbook will begin covering the transition of power on Wednesday, Nov. 6. We’ll deliver daily updates and analysis on the preparations, personnel decisions and policy deliberations that follow the 2024 elections. Have colleagues who will want to get inside the transition? Forward and ask them to subscribe. If Vice President KAMALA HARRIS wins the election, there will be only one other same-party transition in living memory for her team to look at as a blueprint: the 1988 handoff from President RONALD REAGAN to his vice president, GEORGE H. W. BUSH. West Wing Playbook called CRAIG FULLER , the co-director of Bush’s ’88 presidential transition, to chat about what a same party transition is like and advice he has for Harris’ team, should she be the next president. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. What’s unique about a same party transition? In the case of Vice President Bush, and I’m sure in the case of Vice President Harris, there was a desire to change people — to bring in new people, new energy. In our case with Vice President Bush, the Cabinet members were all asked to submit a letter of resignation. Some of them thought they would continue on because they had a good relationship with Vice President Bush. And it fell to me to explain to a few of them: “No, sorry, that’s not going to happen.” So, there is an expectation that some in the current administration may stay in place or that there’s bigger opportunities for them — and there could be. But they have to understand that the candidate who has just been elected president sometimes has different ideas about the direction they want to go in. So the idea that a Harris administration would be a bunch of Biden holdovers might be overblown? Usually the chatter about people staying in place comes from the people who want to stay in place. At the time, you often described the Reagan-to-Bush transition as a “friendly takeover.” What did you mean by that? The term “friendly takeover” emerges from people that, on the one hand, want to be respectful of the officials who have worked in these offices for a period of time in the administration that’s leaving. Many of them are friends. So that’s the friendly part. The takeover part is the message that change is coming. We had an election, people have voted for somebody to bring forward policies, not all of which are the same as the current administration. It’s two words, when combined, that represent the dichotomy of the task at hand. What else is particularly challenging about a same-party transition? There are different kinds of challenges when you have the same party because you have an outgoing president with key people who feel strongly on certain issues. But you have an incoming president with the clock running to put together the first budget. And the budget document — while we all know is often declared dead on arrival on Capitol Hill — is the place where the commitments, the promises, the [campaign] pledges all have to come together. That work began on the transition. When issues are not viewed the same way by the new administration, there can be a little bit of chatter about whether people want to critique the direction it’s going. Right. You want to signal that you will take a different approach. But that could lead to an awkward few months. Each phrase uttered by a president-elect is a forward-thinking concept. The person who’s sitting in that job that’s going to lose that job thinks, “Well, what do they mean? Why are they critiquing what we do?” There’s a lot of sensitivities. And the outgoing people are also under the stress and pressure of figuring out what they are going to do. They’ve known there’s going to be a change in administration for some time, but the reality hits them on Election Day or soon then after. So they have an important job to do with helping with the transition, but they also have to go figure out what they’re going to do next, and that creates a degree of stress. Any words of wisdom to the Harris team if they win? That old phrase always comes to my mind: “It's not the beginning of the end, it’s the end of the beginning.” It’s always hard to say to people who are exhausted from a campaign. One piece of advice is: Don’t promise one person a specific job. Give yourself the opportunity as the president elect to look for the two or three best people for a job, make sure that you’re getting the right balance, the right dynamics in the Cabinet. Make sure you can get the person you may want confirmed. The other piece of advice, which I think sometimes gets overlooked, is that a president never has the freedom to make these decisions about people like they do during the transition period. Once you’ve put people in place, even if there’s a desire to make a change, there’s always a sense that, “Well, it’ll create a bad set of stories.” There’s a tendency to hang on to people. Getting it right the first time is extremely valuable. MESSAGE US — Are you YOHANNES ABRAHAM? We want to hear from you. And we’ll keep you anonymous! Email us at westwingtips@politico.com. Did someone forward this email to you? Subscribe here!
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