Cabinet Members and The Presidency

Over the past few weeks, President-elect Obama’s choices for Cabinet posts have garnered substantial attention. Perhaps receiving the most among these was the choice of Sen. Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State. Many have asked how serving in this cabinet post might affect her chances for a Presidential run in the future. All of this discussion has brought two questions to my mind.

First, what is the likelihood that a Secretary of State will become President? This is a question that has had two distinctly different answers historically. To address this, I looked at every person who has served in the Cabinet to see how many of them were subsequently elected President. In turns out that the list is not so long: only eight people who have held a Cabinet position went on to become President. Put another way, of our 42 Presidents, just 19% had previously served in the Cabinet.

Of the Cabinet posts in which future Presidents had served, Secretary of State was by far the most common: six former Secretaries of State went on to the oval office. In fact, in the early years of this nation, this pattern was the norm. Five of the first seven Presidents for whom this was possible served as Secretary of State before their tenure in the highest office. (As our first President, obviously Washington could not have previously served in any capacity in the government.) These were Presidents Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and van Buren.

However, since 1850, no Secretary of State has risen to the Presidency. James Buchanan was the most recent to serve in both capacities, having served as Secretary of State from 1845 to 1849. The only other Cabinet posts to have been previously held by Presidents were the Secretaries of War (Monroe and Taft) and Commerce (Hoover).

Has a cabinet post been a stepping-stone to the oval office? Apparently not, unless you were around in the first several decades of our nation’s history…

The second thing that has struck me is the number of Obama’s nominees who will have to resign elected office in order to serve. Of his first seven nominees for the Cabinet, three will have to resign from a Congressional office or Governorship in order to serve. Sen. Hillary Clinton will have to resign, as well as Governors Janet Napolitano and Bill Richardson. If the list is expanded to include Cabinet-level posts, the list includes Vice-President-elect and Sen. Joe Biden and White House Chief of Staff designee Congressman Rahm Emanuel.

Fully half of these Cabinet-level nominees and designees are currently serving in Congress or as Governor.

Is this the norm? To get a quick look, I examined the first appointments to the Cabinets of our last two Presidents. Only 14% (4 of 29) of the first appointments to the Cabinet of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had to resign an elected office to serve. These included two Governors and two members of the House of Representatives. Another seven had served as Governor or a member of Congress prior to their appointments, making the total that had served a bit more than one-third.

So, Obama seems to be staffing his Cabinet with more people who currently hold elective office. I think this is a good thing.