Martin O'Malley 'arguably the best manager working in government today'
from Haley Sweetland Edwards at Washington Monthly:
Should Martin O’Malley Be President?
The governor of Maryland is a long shot for the White House—and the best manager in government today. - May/ June 2013
The truth is, what makes O’Malley stand out is not his experience, his gravitas, nor his familiarity to voters (Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden crush him in those regards). Nor is it exactly his policies or speeches (New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, both rumored presidential aspirants, have cultivated similar CVs). Nor is it that he plays in a band. Nor is it even the Atlantic’s breathless claim last year that he has “the best abs” in politics. (Beneath a photo of the fit governor participating in the Maryland Special Olympics’ annual Polar Bear Plunge, the author gushed, “What are they putting in the water in Maryland?”) Instead, what makes O’Malley unique as a politician is precisely the skill that was on display in that windowless conference room in downtown Annapolis: he is arguably the best manager working in government today.
That may not seem like a very flashy title—at first blush, “Best Manager” sounds more like a booby prize than a claim a politician might ride to the White House. But in an era where the very idea of government is under assault, a politician’s capacity to deliver on his or her promises, to actually make the bureaucracy work, is an underappreciated skill.
Of course, it was a conservative president who most recently demonstrated his woeful lack of such expertise (see George W. Bush, administration of), but it is the liberal and progressive bloc that stakes its identity on a belief in government, and therefore has a higher stake in getting government management right.
In 2012 Barack Obama cobbled together a motley majority, unified by a shared belief that the federal government can and should play a larger role in solving the country’s common problems. The best way to ensure that voting bloc’s enthusiasm for the Democrats lasts—and the best hope to reduce some of the antigovernment anger on the other side—is for government to deliver results. That means not only passing big legislation, but also making sure that the programs that result, and the rest of the government’s far-flung endeavors, actually work. It means eliminating waste. It means funneling increasingly scarce resources where they can make the most difference. It means making sure that health care access grows while costs stay reasonable; that when hurricanes hit, disaster relief arrives quickly; that big banks don’t implode; that oil rigs don’t explode; that the murder rate goes down and that student test scores go up. What we need in the next president, in other words, is not just creative policy-making and politicking, but a willingness to drive the bureaucracy to perform. He or she must have a passion for managing the government itself.
It’s a tough order to fill. Considering the growing complexity and size of both the federal government and the challenges it has been asked to address, many would characterize it as Sisyphean. But fortunately, over the last couple of decades, through trial and error, new systems of goal setting, data gathering, and accountability have been developed in the public sector that attempt to give elected officials some of the same tools corporate leaders use to demand bottom-line results from their organizations. These new accountability systems are hardly panaceas; in fact, they have disappointed more often than they have succeeded. But it just so happens that the politician who is most broadly recognized to have made them work the best is none other than Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley.
...O’Malley is not the kind of person who’s afraid to take over a meeting. “I’m an operations guy,” he tells me afterward, partly by way of explanation. “I’ve always liked digging into the numbers, figuring out what’s going on and doing the kind of analysis that the other guys won’t do.” In the hallway after the meeting, two staffers corroborate the point. He seems so much more relaxed in meetings like that, they say, when he’s not “doing all the politician stuff.”
...As governor, he’s pushed a series of bills that are all but guaranteed to impress Democratic primary and caucus voters three years from now, on topics ranging from guns (against), gay marriage (for), the death penalty (against), medical marijuana (for), and implementing Dream Act-like policies at Maryland’s colleges and universities. Just as Bill Clinton did in the 1980s, when he too was a relative unknown, O’Malley has also sought positions in recent years that have allowed him to sidle into the national limelight. In both 2011 and 2012, he served as chair of the Democratic Governors Association, and he’s since stayed on as the finance chairman, which will allow him to continue to meet top donors. During the election last year, he was a regular fixture on the talk show circuit, often playing the role of President Barack Obama’s personal attack dog. In one interview with ABC’s This Week last summer, O’Malley managed to mention former Governor Mitt Romney’s “Swiss bank accounts” and “offshore” tax havens seventeen times in three minutes flat.
With that iron message discipline, plus his standing as one of the Democrats’ most successful governors (with thirty statehouses in GOP hands, the Dems’ roster is slim), O’Malley won a coveted primetime speaking slot for the second time (he spoke in 2004, too) at the Democratic National Convention...
While O’Malley may have considerable bragging rights from his time as mayor and governor, if he runs for president, he’ll still have some serious explaining to do. For one, his passage of laws banning the death penalty, regulating gun purchases, and approving an offshore wind farm will certainly endear him to Democratic primary voters, but there’s not a lot in his record so far that will warm the hearts of more conservative, but persuadable, voters in states like Ohio, Virginia, and Nevada, which he very well might need in a general election. Same goes for his recent move to increase the gas tax for the first time in two decades. While it’s no doubt a boon for Maryland’s infrastructure, it’s generally a wildly unpopular policy among average voters of any stripe. David Ferguson, the chairman of the Maryland Republicans, recently wrote in a media brief that O’Malley, “determined to become President of the United States,” is pursuing a “radical social agenda,” “ ‘checking the boxes’ for the most extreme and liberal Democratic Party primary voters.” O’Malley has not crossed any of his own liberal base groups, which might signal ideological independence...
Halfway through his second term as governor, O’Malley has a handful of big legislative victories to be proud of, as well as some managerial ones. While his state, along with the rest of the county, is still limping from the recession, he can brag about the fact that the Maryland school system has been ranked first in the nation for five years running, up from third place in 2008; that his administration was able to hold down the cost of tuition at state colleges and universities; and that crime rates, following trends across the country, are the lowest ever recorded in the state. He can also brag about incremental but important progress on issues like pollution in the Chesapeake and eliminating the DNA backlog from Maryland’s criminal justice sector.
Since 2007, StateStat, like CitiStat, has also become a model for analysts and researchers who study government performance, as well as practitioners of the confused art. In recent years, O’Malley’s team in Annapolis, like his team in Baltimore, has become an attraction for visitors, who come to see how StateStat works. Since 2007, O’Malley has hosted governors from more than a dozen other states and leaders from all over the world, from Peru to Pakistan, from China to Northern Ireland. In 2008, the Obama administration turned to O’Malley’s programs as inspiration for its model of how to manage the federal bureaucracy. And in 2009, Governing magazine put O’Malley on the cover of its issue highlighting the country’s best public servants. He was the only governor in the spread. In the last thirteen years, O’Malley’s general data-driven managerial style has even earned its own name among those who study such things: PerformanceStat. Behn, the Harvard lecturer, is writing a whole book about it.
...Of course, skillfully managing the federal government is a job for neither the cynic nor the faint of heart. It’s an enormously complex task, to say the least, and no president or vice president in recent memory—none perhaps since Franklin Delano Roosevelt—has tackled it with any holistic success. But when I asked O’Malley if he thought it was even possible—is StateStat even scalable to the federal level? FedStat, anyone?—he considered it for a minute, admitted the enormous difficulties of the job, and said yes. Then, putting his feet up on the desk in front of him, he transitioned from O’Malley-the-wonky-manager to O’Malley-the-guy-who-actually-likes-all-that-politician-stuff.
“You know,” he said, “I think the truth is we need FedStat. At a time when people are so very cynical about what our public institutions are capable of delivering, the power of openness and transparency and the willingness of leaders to make themselves vulnerable by declaring goals could well restore that essential trust that we need in order to bring forth a new era of progress.” He stopped, nodding at the cadence of his own thoughts...
read more: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/may_june_2013/features/should_martin_omalley_be_presi044513.php?page=all
= new reply since forum marked as read
