As an add-on point to the post below, people should really be taking the Obama campaign's political instincts seriously here. My main concern with the Chicago crew was that they weren't sufficiently attuned to the gridlock and toxicity of Washington politics. That they thought it could be fixed rather than understood that it had to be overcome. Whatever the other problems, elevating guys like Emanuel is an admission of the opposite. That Washington is a hard place to work, and if you're going to get anything done, the politics are going to have to come first. It's also evidence of how much the Clinton administration has strengthened an incoming Democrats' hand. When Clinton took office in 1992, it had been 12 years since the last Democratic administration. And that administration had been an unmitigated failure. There was no executive-level experience in the Democratic establishment, no one who knew how this should be done. And they made a lot of mistakes that, in retrospect, looked to be simple inexperience mixed with simply poor advice. But look at the Obama crew. They have John Podesta, former White House chief of staff, running transition. They have a senior adviser and strategist, in Rahm Emanuel, readying to become chief of staff. They have the former Treasury Secretary on the short list. And there will be many more. Indeed, there's an interesting continuity with Obama's approach to working in the Senate. There, his chief of staff was Pete Rouse, former chief of staff to majority leader Tom Daschle. His campaign staff was made up almost entirely of veterans from the congressional leadership (veterans of the Clinton campaigns, obviously, were going with Clinton). He hired, in other words, the folks with maximal Washington experience, and that meant the congressional leadership. Now that he can access the Clinton teams, he seems to be doing the same thing at the executive level. What he's not doing is elevating a bunch of Chicago buddies or personal policy favorites to top roles. For all the talk of Obama's inexperience, he's a guy who clearly puts a lot of weight on past experience when doing his own hiring. (For more on all this, see the article Dana Goldstein and I did on Obama's attitude towards party-building -- it's turning out to have a lot of relevance to his attitude towards administration building.)
