Obama Promises New Destiny, Work Begins Today

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Actually, Obama was resisting in the name of balance: the bulk of his proposed stimulus package will probably go to short-term fixes — his promised $300 billion in tax breaks for the middle class, $200 billion in aid to cities and states, benefits for the poor and unemployed. Even so, aides say, most of Obama's attention has been focused elsewhere — on the long-term stimulus projects, the larger transformations in the economy, the health-care system and foreign policy. Quietly, the Obama transition team reviewed every government agency "to find out which specific programs were working and which weren't." It was a terrifyingly brisk and comprehensive process, especially compared with the dust storm produced by the last Democratic President, Bill Clinton, during his chaotic transition period. "During Clinton's transition, you had all these people writing ad hoc papers about what to do at this agency or how to deal with that policy, but that was an extension of how Clinton's mind works," says one of the many Obama aides who is a veteran of the Clinton Administration. "Clinton had this great horizontal intelligence. He could pull an idea from a meeting he had in northern Italy and apply it to spreading broadband service through Iowa. It was amazing but not exactly efficient. Obama is more vertical. He pushes the process along, streamlines it. We had one 25-to-50-page policy paper for every agency."

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Well, that's Democrats for you. It's hard to imagine any Republican President since Reagan wanting to rummage through all that paper, or being fastidious enough to care about the strengths and weaknesses of every federal agency. If government was the problem, as Reagan suggested, the solution, theoretically, was less of it — and since reducing government proved impossible, as opposed to reducing taxes, there didn't seem to be all that much interest in actually making it work more efficiently. By contrast, Obama and his eclectic team of appointees give the impression of being positively intoxicated by the prospect of figuring out how everything works. Obama's closest aides like to say he isn't a "wonk" like Clinton, immersed in policy details to the point of immobility, but clearly the new President has a breadth and depth of policy interests, especially in comparison with his immediate predecessor. (See the best of the Obama Inaugural merchandise.)

In some ways, the most surprising of his appointments — Hillary Clinton, the new Secretary of State — has emerged as an exemplar of Obamism. At her confirmation hearing, Clinton seemed completely prepared on every imaginable topic, orderly, undramatic and yet willing to propose some radical changes in the State Department's structure. She seems intent on tilting the department away from its stultifying bureaucratic orthodoxies and toward solving specific problems. To do so, she will appoint no fewer than five, and perhaps more, high-profile special envoys who will do the heavy lifting and share her spotlight on the most vexing foreign policy problems — former Senator George Mitchell to calm down the Middle East, Richard Holbrooke to deal with the Afghanistan-Pakistan nexus and others for Iran, North Korea, the global-climate-change treaty negotiations and possibly another for the ever forgotten neighbors to our south. (See pictures of heartbreak in the Middle East.)

Clinton, who can be spiky, has re-emerged as a natural diplomat. When she heard that Holbrooke and General David Petraeus had never met, she invited them over to her Washington home on a Friday night before the Inauguration. The two men spent two hours in front of a roaring fire with Clinton, getting to know each other, talking about the diplomatic and military division of labor in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Clinton's was an Obamian gesture — enticing the lion to lie down with the lion — the sort of attention to detail that seems to have been replicated across the policymaking spectrum during the Obama transition.

It will be domestic, not foreign, policy that will occupy the President's attention for the next few months. The first order of business will be to shepherd the $825 billion stimulus package through Congress and ride herd on the additional $350 billion available to stabilize the banks. But the goal is to press an ambitious series of actions — policies that might have seemed impossible before the financial crash — across the board as quickly as possible. The quest for a national health-insurance system will debut with a major conference, bringing all the various players — including corporate America and the insurance companies to the table in late winter or early spring. The hope is that a bill to provide universal access, as promised during the campaign, will nudge its way through Congress by next fall. Also coming in the first half of the year will be a comprehensive environmental policy, including some tough decisions on how to go about reducing carbon emissions. If Obama can accomplish any one of these, he will surprise a great many Washington skeptics.

In the latter days of the transition, there seemed an inclination to delay some of the splashy foreign trips that will, in the end, be among the most memorable moments of the Obama presidency. The President will go to Europe in April to attend the next G-20 meeting on the global economic crisis. The steady pitch of crises and atrocities will demand his attention. There are crucial decisions to be made about the pace of withdrawal from Iraq and how many U.S. troops to add in Afghanistan. (Asked about the persistent reports from the Pentagon that up to 30,000 more troops are scheduled for Afghanistan, a senior Obama aide said, "No — repeat, no — decision has been made about troop levels in Afghanistan, and anyone at the Pentagon who says otherwise should be fired.") But foreign policy developments seem destined to take some time, given the new President's proclivities: there will not be the macho kinetics of the Bush years nor the bang-bang nor the bellicose phrases like axis of evil. Obama was careful to avoid the phrase global war on terror in his Inaugural Address. Instead, there will be a steady drip-drip-drip of diplomacy, especially on neglected issues like nuclear proliferation. Even in the war zones, the Obama Administration will be talking relentlessly — trying to bring the nonextremist Taliban tribes into the Afghan government, trying to establish coalitions of Iraq's and Afghanistan's neighbors (including Iran) to help lower the tensions, hoping the steady accretion of talk and trust will bring the Israelis and Palestinians to a point at which they can begin negotiating a real peace.

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See pictures of Obama's Inauguration behind the scenes.