Transition Team Looks to Emulate Roosevelt, Not Carter

[tekisui]

At the end of a gruelling 21-month campaign that has already flecked his hair with grey, the hard work for Barack Obama is just beginning.

Yesterday he began the task of turning the tight inner circle of advisers that ran his formidable election machine into a unit capable of running an administration confronting economic convulsions at home and fragile security abroad.

Congressman Rahm Emanuel, a former adviser to President Clinton, has been asked to be his White House chief of staff. John Podesta, another veteran of that Administration, is expected to join Mr Obama’s aides Pete Rouse and Valerie Jarrett in leading the transition team.

Spokesman Robert Gibbs is tipped to be his press secretary, while there may also be a senior role for the election strategist David Axelrod. His campaign manager, David Plouffe, who is expecting the birth of his second child any day, however, appears more reluctant to take a role in the new White House, saying: “I’ve done my part.”

During the long campaign Mr Obama had become fond of quoting Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity: “Doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results.”

Neither the President-elect nor any of his sober, meticulous advisers is mad. In recent weeks, as it became more likely that he would win the election, they have been preparing for this day by reading their history.

They know how swiftly past victories have turned to despair. When the past two Democratic presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, entered the White House they also enjoyed substantial majorities in Congress. Mr Carter failed to win a second term after a presidency that has become almost a byword for dysfunction. Mr Clinton’s chaotic first two years – during which he was immediately blown off course by rows over gays serving the armed forces – allowed Republicans to surge back with a landslide in mid-term Congressional elections.

Particular attention is being paid to the latter despite – or perhaps because of – the fact that Mr Podesta was the former president’s chief of staff.

Mr Obama’s team prefer the model of Franklin Roosevelt, whose 1933 inauguration came in the depths of the Great Depression but went on to forge a Democratic coalition that was to stand firm for 20 years.

Not since then, say Democratic advisers, has an incoming president received such a poisonous inheritance. On top of global crisis and a federal deficit ballooning towards $1 trillion, there are two unfinished wars and a continuing national security threat from terrorists.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article5093819.ece