Jump-Starting the Obama Presidency

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President Elect Barack Obama introduced four new members of his economic team, Timothy F. Geithner, Christina Romer, Lawrence Summers and Melody Barnes, at the Chicago Hilton Towers in downtown Chicago.

Jon Lowenstein / NOOR for TIME

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THE JOB OF FINDING THE RIGHT combination of spark, fuse and black powder will fall to Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner, two friends Obama named to lead his economic team. Geithner, 47, will leave his job as chief of the New York Federal Reserve to become Treasury Secretary. His mentor Summers, 54, who was Treasury boss for a year and a half under Bill Clinton, will move into the West Wing in January to take over the National Economic Council (NEC), the clearinghouse for all economic policy inside the Administration.

The two men are an interesting protégé-and-mentor team: Summers is the deep, intellectual economist who can be brusque if not arrogant. Geithner is a smoother, harder-to-read operator who gets along well with everyone. Of the two, Summers is the one to watch. He is expected to do for the economy what strong-minded and ambitious National Security Advisers like Henry Kissinger have done for foreign policy: plan it, set it and control it.

Summers is a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat who believes in trying to keep the conflicting forces of the U.S. economy--free trade, worker protections, rising incomes and fair tax rates--in balance. And he believes in risking dramatic action in a crisis. "It's a lot easier to correct the errors of overreaction than the errors of underreaction," Summers said in a speech to a securities-industry group in October.

While Summers has worked for almost every Democratic President or nominee for the past 20 years, Geithner's politics are more moderate. Once a registered Republican, he is now an independent, and his instincts are also more opaque. He tried and failed to arrange a private buyout for Lehman Brothers in September and led the $152.5 billion AIG bailout, which proved to be far more expensive than the current Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, had anticipated. But Geithner has withheld judgment in public on key issues, like an ambitious program to modify bad home loans that has run into opposition from White House conservatives. He owes his present job in part to his ability, while at Treasury in the Clinton Administration, to stand up to Summers, according to New York University president John Sexton, who led the committee that chose Geithner for the New York Fed. "Summers told us that Tim was one of the very few people who, when Larry got on a roll, would sometimes take him up short and say, 'Stop. Rethink that position,'" says Sexton. "And do it in a way that caused even Larry to stop and think and even occasionally change his view." And Geithner is no longer inclined to see himself as Summers' aide. "Tim is not taking this job to be subordinate," says a person familiar with the friendship.

Both men will arrive with baggage. Summers was under consideration for the Treasury job himself and may feel slighted by being passed over. He had a troubled tenure as president of Harvard, where his controversial comments about women's aptitude for math and science were a reminder that he operates best when he is working behind the scenes. His job at NEC is designed to make him the captain of the team but avoid an unpleasant Senate confirmation hearing. Though smoother than Summers in style, Geithner will have to explain to the Senate Banking Committee just exactly what he was doing last year while all those Manhattan investment banks came unglued.