#260 Presidential Transitions w/ David Marchick
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 23 January 2023
⏱️ 48 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
January 20th was the official halfway mark of the Biden Administration's first term. That might seem like a an odd time to discuss Presidential transitions, but with the justice department still prosecuting participants in the January 6th insurrection it's never too soon to ask ourselves what lay ahead for 2024.
Our guest in this episode, David Marchick is Dean of the Kogod School of Business at American University, but until recently he was director of the Partnership for Public Service's Center for Presidential Transition and the host of its Transition Lab podcast. He is also the co-author of a fascinating new book The Peaceful Transfer of Power: An Oral History of America's Presidential Transitions (UVA Press, 2022).
Whether it was the worst transition in our nation's history—Buchanan to Abraham Lincoln or arguably the smoothest—The Bush 43 to Obama administrations—Marchick breaks down the good, the bad, and the ugly of Presidential transitions.
This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to The Road to Now. I'm Bob Crawford. Ben is on assignment this week. Today I am joined by David Marchick, who is the dean of American University's Kogod School of Business. David was the head of the Center for Presidential Transitions. Late last year, he put out a book called |
| 0:21.7 | The Peaceful Transfer of Power and Oral History of America's Presidential Transitions. And the book is |
| 0:28.8 | based on a podcast called Transition Lab, which was put out by the Center for Presidential Transitions. |
| 0:35.7 | And it's really fascinating. Of course, today we're recording on |
| 0:40.8 | January 20th, 2023 exactly two years into the Joe Biden presidency. So two years ago today, |
| 0:50.5 | President Trump, President Biden's transition ended. And I think David's going to tell us that it wasn't the smoothest transition in history. |
| 1:00.4 | But we're going to talk about that. |
| 1:02.1 | David Marchik, welcome to The Road to Now. |
| 1:05.1 | Thanks for having me. |
| 1:06.6 | Excited to have you here. |
| 1:08.4 | And let's maybe start with this and then work backwards in some |
| 1:13.4 | ways. But you've written a book about presidential transitions. You've spoken with chiefs of staff, |
| 1:22.9 | all kinds of politicians up and down the chain, people involved in that process of a presidential transition. |
| 1:30.9 | Here, two years ago, 2021, November 2020 to January 20th, 2021, we had quite a presidential transition. |
| 1:41.8 | So as a man who's an expert in presidential transitions, |
| 1:46.1 | how do you rate and rank the Trump to Biden transition? Okay. Thanks very much again for |
| 1:53.9 | having me. I'm excited to be here and a fan of your show, so really thrilled. So presidential |
| 1:59.7 | transitions are a critical moment for our democracy. |
| 2:03.6 | They're part of the foundation of democracy from when one president peacefully hands off |
| 2:07.8 | the baton to another. |
| 2:10.3 | You know, we've had 230 plus years of peaceful transitions of power ever since George |
| 2:15.5 | Washington handed the reins to John Adams voluntarily, which the whole |
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