The handoff from the Bush administration to the incoming Obama administration is proceeding smoothly — partly because of a 2004 law that enabled the FBI to speed up security clearances, but also because the Obama campaign made a speedy transition a priority.
Paul Light, a professor at New York University, has just written a book about government transitions called A Government Ill Executed. But he says Barack Obama's transition is an exception to the rule.
"It's an A-plus-plus at this point," he says. "Very well-prepared on Election Day. Very, very good start."
One of the reasons is that the president-elect has learned from those ill-executed transitions of the past.
"One of the things, I think, has already been demonstrated, which is to name a White House chief of staff early, and the president-elect did that two days after the election by naming Rahm Emanuel," says John Podesta, a co-chairman of the Obama transition team.
As chief of staff in the Clinton White House, Podesta learned the hard way how not to do a transition.
"President Clinton recognizes that, I think, he struggled at the beginning because he waited and named his White House staff quite late," Podesta says. "He spent all his time — and very good quality time — selecting an excellent Cabinet, but when he got into the White House, I think he found that having only a couple of weeks to assemble a White House team had left him in a state where things weren't humming from Day 1."
Running a presidential campaign is not the same as running a country, but Podesta predicts that the no-drama style of Obama's campaign management will also be President Obama's governing style.
"His expectation is that people will be disciplined, that they won't be out there freelancing and leaking," Podesta says. "No one plays error-free ball, but I think that one of the things the Obama campaign certainly showed was that they could open up to literally millions of people and still maintain a level of discipline at the top that really is quite extraordinary, and I expect to see that in the White House as well."
With a deepening global recession unfolding, the new president is trying to staff a government at the same time he is working with the outgoing administration to deal with the crisis. Gene Sperling, another Clinton White House veteran, says it is very different from 1992, when all the Clinton team had to do was prepare its first budget and deficit-reduction plan.
"To actually look for a precedent for this, you'd have to find somebody who was alive in 1932, and we all know that what FDR decided to do during that period was simply sit on the sidelines and let Hoover stew in his own juices," Sperling says.
But Obama showed that when it came to the economy, "you had to be in a very serious governing mode," even during the campaign, Sperling says, adding that he thinks Obama will feel the need to show the world that the United States is on top of the economic woes during the transition.
One way Obama can make that clear is to name a Treasury secretary quickly. And that pick, along with Obama's choices for the heads of the State, Defense and Justice departments, will reveal a lot about how the president-elect plans to govern.
"There are more trial balloons going up over the Obama administration than at a clown convention," Light says. "We've got names circulating all over the place, and I think the Obama team [is] waiting to see how they play. ... And I think we're going to see a more pragmatic administration than a liberal administration."
Because, Light says, that is the message Obama's choice for chief of staff has already sent.
"It tells us a little bit about his acknowledgment of his potential weakness, which is that he thinks too much," Light says. "I'm not saying that Rahm Emanuel doesn't think enough, but he's a disciplining force. He's been very effective on Capitol Hill and disciplining the Democratic Party in the House on behalf of Speaker Pelosi. He's a tough customer and you're not going to move anything past him without close inspection. ... You need Obama to be cool, but you need somebody there to turn up the burner."
With the beginnings of a new White House staff in place, Obama will now turn to naming his Cabinet secretaries. A top transition official says many of those names will be announced before the end of the month.
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