A word of advice from Dan Quayle

From Politico;

The most important word for Barack Obama’s incoming administration will be “no,” said former Vice President Dan Quayle.

That means rejecting demands for ambassadorships from fat-cat contributors and resisting requests for Cabinet posts and other high-profile jobs coveted by senior campaign staff.

“You get input from the Republican National Committee, you get plenty of input from Capitol Hill — believe me, senators and congressmen are not reluctant to suggest their top fundraisers for a special position,” Quayle said during a recent interview at the New York office of Cerberus Capital Management, where he heads the international division.

The president-elect and his team also must be willing to clip the wings of incoming Cabinet members and fellow high-ranking appointees, Quayle said, reflecting on his experiences during the 1988-89 transition between the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

“If you install somebody as secretary of state, that person is going to have five to 10 people that he really wants to bring in. The White House may say, ‘Well, we really want this other person in,’ who is probably more loyal to the president than to whoever is going to be secretary of state. Those are huge fights and messy, and it happens all the time.”

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Some more words of wisdom from Dan Quayle;

“The campaign managers, they belong in the White House — personnel, scheduling, advance, which is a huge operation, maybe the chief of staff,” he said, ticking off areas and posts he said were suitable for political campaign workers. “But the advisory groups,” he said, referring to a campaign’s policy brain trust, “are the ones who will be running the government.”

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Capitol Hill relations also were an important emphasis of the presidential transition 20 years ago, according to Quayle, who served four years in the House and eight in the Senate before his election as vice president. And surviving the bruising 1988 campaign helped bolster his stature among former Hill colleagues, he said.

“I had a lot of the relationships — it was a matter of keeping those relationships” even as President-elect Bush leaned on him to lobby the Senate, Quayle recalled. “He would always say, ‘That Senate of yours — what’s going on up there?’”

“I spent a lot of time on the Hill,” Quayle said. “But you’ve got to be a little selective. You can’t just go camp out up there, because you lose your effectiveness. When you make a call, make sure it’s an important call, because there’s only so many times you can call your friends up and ask them to do things that they might not want to do.”

And Hill input is vital for a smooth transition, ­Quayle continued.

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Full article here

Say what you will about Dan Quayle, but I think he has great insightful advice.  I recall back in the early eighties, when C-Span first went on cable, my grandpa whom I get my no-nonsense commonsense Conseervative values from would sit in front of the TV smoking Pall Malls and drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon he would talk to the TV, complaining about the Liberal Democrats and talking about his favorite Republicans.  He would also talk about Republicans who looked as though they were shifting from the recent Reagan Concervatives.  He liked Dan Quayle and thought he was a very smart guy.