Á¦¸ñ Obama Fills Top Posts at a Sprint
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December 5, 2008
Issues Pressing, Obama Fills Top Posts at a Sprint
By PETER BAKER and HELENE COOPER



CHICAGO — The call summoning him was somewhat cryptic. Only after Gen. James L. Jones showed up in a hotel suite for a one-on-one meeting with Barack Obama did it become clear what was going on.

Would General Jones be interested in a senior national security job? Mr. Obama asked. General Jones said he would be.

That was Oct. 22, a full 13 days before the election. This week, the two appeared together here as the president-elect announced that he was appointing General Jones as his national security adviser.

Mr. Obama is moving more quickly to fill his administration¡¯s top ranks than any newly elected president in modern times. He has named virtually the entire top echelon of his White House staff and nearly half of his cabinet. Just a month after his election, Mr. Obama has announced his selections for 13 of the 24 most important positions in a new administration.

By comparison, Bill Clinton had filled only one of those jobs by this point in his transition, and Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan only two. Even the elder George Bush, who had the advantage of succeeding a fellow Republican, had picked just eight a month after his election. George W. Bush, stalled by the Florida recount, had named a chief of staff at this point in 2000 but was waiting to find out if he would even become president.

Mr. Obama¡¯s advisers are acutely aware that moving too quickly can cause mistakes. But accounts of the process emerging from participants suggest that the president-elect is trying to be decisive as well as methodical and secretive in filling out his administration, perhaps foreshadowing how he intends to run the government.

¡°You don¡¯t have time to waste,¡± said Rahm Emanuel, the incoming White House chief of staff, who was named to his post two days after the election. ¡°This is the worst economic situation since the Great Depression and the largest commitment of troops overseas since Richard Nixon. That¡¯s the world we¡¯re inheriting, and the president-elect said we don¡¯t have a moment to waste putting things together.¡±

Aides said Mr. Obama had been determined to expedite the cumbersome selection and vetting cycle that had bogged down previous transitions, in the hope that Senate confirmation of top nominees would be accelerated. They said he had been particularly committed to avoid what happened in 2001, when many top national security positions were still unfilled at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks.

So far, none of Mr. Obama¡¯s appointees have run into serious controversies, although questions are being raised about the involvement of Eric H. Holder Jr., the choice for attorney general, in Mr. Clinton¡¯s last-minute pardon of Marc Rich, the fugitive financier. In other cases, Mr. Obama avoided difficulty by passing over early front-runners, among them John O. Brennan, a candidate for director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who could have run into trouble.

¡°If you make a mistake, it has more resonance in the early period than it does later on,¡± said Martha Joynt Kumar, the director of the White House Transition Project, a scholarly effort.

According to transition officials, Mr. Obama set the process in motion in August by recruiting John D. Podesta, Mr. Clinton¡¯s former chief of staff, to lead his transition. Mr. Obama began to meet secretly with potential candidates before Election Day, transition officials said, though it is not clear exactly when that process began.

Advisers contacted General Jones and asked him to catch up with Mr. Obama on the campaign trail. General Jones, who had spoken with Mr. Obama only twice before, rode by car one day from Washington to Richmond, Va., for the meeting.

No promises were made that morning, but it touched off a series of telephone calls about possible jobs and issues like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. ¡°We did a walk around the world a couple of times,¡± General Jones said in an interview. Shortly after the election, he was asked to come to Chicago, where he met again with Mr. Obama and talked about becoming secretary of state or national security adviser, people close to the transition said.

Likewise, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was not sure what Mr. Obama wanted to talk about when she was summoned here last month, said another person close to the transition. She had heard speculation about jobs, but only after she arrived at Mr. Obama¡¯s office did he ask her to think about being secretary of state.

Only a handful of advisers are intimately involved as Mr. Obama makes his selections, including Mr. Emanuel; Mr. Podesta; Valerie Jarrett, his longtime adviser; Pete Rouse, his chief of staff in the Senate; and Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., aides said.

Mr. Obama has personally interviewed all of his senior appointees and has sometimes met with more than one candidate before deciding, aides said. At one point, he was set to make Peter R. Orszag, the Congressional budget director, his White House budget director without a meeting because they had worked together. But Mr. Orszag was brought to Chicago anyway.

The interviews played a critical role in settling on a Treasury secretary. Although Mr. Obama knew former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, he did not really know the other main candidate, Timothy F. Geithner, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. After meeting with him, Mr. Obama told some people he felt temperamentally in sync with Mr. Geithner, who is the same age as Mr. Obama, 47, and shares a certain low-key wonkish quality.

But Mr. Obama saw Mr. Summers as a brilliant economist adept at distilling complex issues, despite past controversial statements that might have caused confirmation problems. So Mr. Obama persuaded him to head the White House National Economic Council, an appointment that does not require Senate approval.

¡°I think he fell in love with Tim,¡± said someone familiar with the meeting. ¡°But he also felt he needed to have Larry.¡±

In trying to put his team together rapidly, Mr. Obama is fighting history. It took a little more than two months after inauguration on average for John F. Kennedy¡¯s nominees to be confirmed by the Senate, according to data compiled by Paul Light, a professor at New York University. By Mr. Reagan¡¯s presidency, it took twice that long. President Bush¡¯s appointees on average took nine months.

New legislation and extensive efforts by the Bush administration are helping to speed that up. Clay Johnson III, a Bush aide coordinating with the Obama team, called the president-elect¡¯s selection process ¡°well organized and staffed¡± and said he was on track to put his senior team ¡°on the field faster than any incoming president in recent history.¡±

Peter Baker reported from Chicago, and Helene Cooper from Washington. Jackie Calmes contributed reporting from Washington.

 
   
     


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