NY Times:CHICAGO — He will not formally take power for almost six weeks, but President-elect Barack Obama is already showing some glimpses of how he will wield it.
Despite his professed resolve to stay at arms length from governance during the transition, the economic crisis has forced him to play a more active role — nowhere more so than in Washington’s scramble to avert the collapse of the Big Three automakers with a federal lifeline.
From here at what an aide called his “mini-White House,” Mr. Obama has been pulling on the levers of power far more than any president-elect in memory, using his new stature to influence events in Congress and the real White House of President Bush and yet limited in his ability — as the collapse of the auto bailout legislation in the Senate showed — to control them.
On Friday, after Senate Republicans’ opposition had doomed a $15 billion industry loan the night before, Mr. Obama called on Mr. Bush and Congress to find an alternative. Twenty-four hours earlier, Mr. Obama had used the bully pulpit of a news conference to urge Congress to approve the loan or risk “a devastating ripple effect throughout our economy.”
It was Mr. Obama who set the debate in motion just a week after his election, despite his reluctance to be involved directly. Amid signs that G.M. and Chrysler might not survive the year, he pressed Mr. Bush at a private meeting to support government help. In the next weeks, he directed his advisers to open lines of communication to Republicans. A White House aide said Mr. Obama speaks with Mr. Bush “more than any of us know.”
In both the auto debate and parallel work on his promised two-year economic recovery plan, Mr. Obama has shown an inclination to set the broad terms for debate, and then to delegate details to advisers and Congress. For weeks, in public appearances that included “60 Minutes,” he has consistently defined the goal for the auto bailout as twofold: A loan from taxpayers, but on the conditions that the companies, including Ford, remake themselves to be viable enterprises and their products to be energy efficient.
Yet Mr. Obama digs deeply into issues himself; he surprised one adviser in a conference call about the automakers by knowledgeably discussing “DIP financing,” a complex special form of financing for distressed companies.
Along the way, with a skeleton team of senior advisers, Mr. Obama has shown no hesitance in stepping into disputes between the more experienced Democrats who run the House and Senate to forge the united front he will need in coming years to pass his ambitious agenda.
When it looked last month as if Congress might fail to act because Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, disagreed over where the loan money should come from, Mr. Obama had Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois congressman who will be his White House chief of staff, call Mr. Reid, Democrats familiar with the incident said. “Harry, don’t make this a fight between you and Nancy,” Mr. Emanuel said, according to one. “Make it about what the industry is going to do in return for this money.”
Afterward Mr. Reid and Ms. Pelosi told the company chiefs to return to Detroit and come back with detailed survival plans. They did, but as this week’s session approached, chances for a deal with the White House were grim. Ms. Pelosi, unlike Mr. Reid, would not agree to Mr. Bush’s demand to get the emergency money from a new environmental program intended to subsidize the industry’s long-term retooling to produce energy-saving vehicles.
Mr. Obama himself called her in California last Friday after news of the worst monthly job losses in 34 years, say people familiar with events. That weekend the speaker acquiesced to Mr. Bush, and Mr. Obama vowed on television that as president he would replenish the retooling program she wanted to protect.
By all accounts, Mr. Obama has good relations with Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Reid. But as president he must necessarily be less deferential, making occasional run-ins inevitable, Democrats say.
The hints of Mr. Obama’s leadership style are, of course, limited by the self-imposed constraints reflected in his mantra that the nation has one president at a time. After he takes office, it will be clearer where Mr. Obama fits on the presidential spectrum between the wonkish and pragmatic but less disciplined style of Bill Clinton, and the crisper but less curious and more ideological decision-making of Mr. Bush.
Most of Mr. Obama’s contacts with Congress and the White House as well as auto executives, labor leaders and bankruptcy experts have been through his senior staff. Besides Mr. Emanuel and John D. Podesta, his transition chief, Mr. Obama’s auto team includes Phil Schiliro, a longtime House aide who has gotten a jump on his job as White House legislative liaison to Congress.
Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, who will head Mr. Obama’s National Economic Council, has been Mr. Obama’s touchstone on the economic aspects of the bailout. Also involved are Joshua L. Steiner, a former Treasury official who is a partner in a private-equity firm, and Brian Deese, a policy adviser on the Obama campaign.
“Do everything you can to help the process along but don’t get in the way,” Mr. Obama told them, according to one member of his team. “But if there is some way I can be constructive, I want you to do it. And don’t talk about it.”
After his daily workout, Mr. Obama arrives at his office in a no-frills suite in the Federal Building. He eats peanuts while reviewing memorandums and joining the conference calls that are his main conduits for information until he and his Washington staff are in the White House.
Mr. Obama asks lots of questions, advisers say, and typically makes quick decisions. He leaves the office each day with a notebook stuffed with policy papers and information on potential hires. Each night at home there is a final conference call, about issues coming up the following day.
Barack Obama
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