Enough About the "Team of Rivals"

The pundits and mainstream media have overworked the "Team of Rivals" meme -- that President-elect Obama might like to copy Lincoln's inclusion in his Cabinet of his former political rivals. This idea comes from Doris Kearns Goodwin's book of that name, which Obama reportedly liked, although the book is not a reason to copy the idea -- it was overwritten, repetitious, and chock full of irrelevant details (e.g. about Mary Todd Lincoln's shopping sprees and the soirees of Salmon Chase's daughter). Moreover, the book's theme -- that Lincoln recruited his former opponents as his advisors -- was first noticed when he did it 148 years ago; it's not some blinding new historical insight.

The reality is that there are huge differences between 1860 and 2008 that limit the relevance of this analogy. First, in 1860, the political class (Governors, Senators, nationally experienced politicians) was far smaller than it is today. The professional talent pool available to Lincoln (a man of towering intelligence, who wanted to be challenged by his colleagues) was by today's standards very modest -- and half of it had just seceded to form the confederacy. Lincoln would have been foolish to overlook his rivals if they were talented, as was clearly the case with Seward. But today enormously talented potential Cabinet secretaries are ten times more numerous.

Second, the U.S. was plunging into a nation-rending internal conflict of unknown duration in 1860: Lincoln had to show that he was doing everything to unite diverse points of view within the remaining Union, if he expected to prevail in that conflict. Today our problems are severe but they are not similarly existential. Given the diverse, direct and instantaneous ways that a president can communicate with the nation, beyond having his statements and actions reported in newspapers (as was the case in 1860), a president doesn't need to use the composition of his Cabinet to show us that we can't allow our divisions to obstruct the effort to solve our problems.

Third, as ambitious politicians, Lincoln's Cabinet secretaries' rivalry with each other was as intense as their previous rivalry with him. Except within the precincts of his own heart, and occasionally with intimates, Lincoln was a man of preternatural serenity, unconcerned about back-stairs criticism from subordinates or their dislike of one another. He simply overlooked his Cabinet's animosities, so long as he could milk from them individually the kind of intelligence and productivity that managing a government in the middle of a civil war required. But today we live in a media-saturated age in which politicians have vast retinues of followers and flunkies who happily feed internal back-biting to an army of reporters and commentators. If Lincoln and his Cabinet had been subjected to this kind of scrutiny, their internal rivalries would have distracted the Union and possibly torn apart his administration's effectiveness.

In addition, because political rivals are politicians, that means they are generalists, usually without great specific expertise. Today the complexity of financial, industrial, environmental and international-security challenges require reservoirs of knowledge that elected politicians simply do not have time to acquire. The Cabinet room should have that knowledge inside the room, not sitting in offices back in the departments.

If one of President-elect Obama's former rivals for the presidential nomination is a superb choice on the merits to head a particular Cabinet department, he or she should be appointed. But not because assembling a "team of rivals" is good for its own sake.