WASHINGTON — Now that the confetti has fallen, the nascent administration of Barack Obama has come face to face with one of its biggest challenges: living up to the exceptionally high expectations his thrilling campaign produced among supporters and long-suffering Democrats.
At his transition team's first public briefing Tuesday, the audience was wildly outsized for the presentation by the transition chief, owlish think-tank denizen John Podesta.
Reporters flooded the meeting room, and 300 called in to listen by telephone.
What did they learn? News of Obama's economic plans, his healthcare overhaul and the big issues that dominated the campaign?
No.
Disciplined and cautious as the Obama campaign itself, Podesta did not tip his hand on the big picture. He stuck to one of the few things Obama can quickly control: his own staff. Podesta announced new rules governing lobbyists who work on the transition staff.
So it goes as Obama makes the rocky transition from campaigning to governing.
While campaigning, he frequently decried the polarizing politics of years past.
"I am in this race because I don't want to see us spend the next year re-fighting the Washington battles of the 1990s," he said in a typical speech in South Carolina a year ago. "I don't want this election to be about the past, because if it's about the future, we all win."
But his government-in-waiting is rife with officials from the Clinton administration. Podesta was a senior Clinton White House aide, as was Obama's choice for chief of staff, Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.).
Warren Christopher, who served as President Clinton's first secretary of State and is a partner at the law firm of O'Melveny & Myers in Los Angeles, is heading up the transition for the State Department, and former Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) is preparing things at the Pentagon.
It's starting to look as though Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's family empire is living on, even though she lost the Democratic primary.
The high visibility of old hands and familiar faces underscores a tension that is already running through Team Obama: The president-elect has promised to overthrow Washington's habits of partisanship and cronyism. But it's tempting to turn to seasoned veterans to help him avoid the kinds of rookie mistakes that hobbled Clinton and President Carter. Both learned the hard way that a Congress controlled by the president's party does not guarantee smooth sailing.
