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Obama Faces Political Minefield With Appointments

Texan

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Obama Faces Political Minefield With Appointments

By JONATHAN WEISMAN

President-elect Barack Obama has set ambitious goals for assembling his government, vowing to name appointees at a record pace while balancing pledges of post-partisanship with the needs of the groups that helped deliver his victory.

So far, the process is going smoothly, thanks in part to remarkable cooperation from a Bush White House that Mr. Obama spent two years bashing. But the politics remain thorny. The intricate scheming and speculating surrounding cabinet choices was on full display Friday, a day after Mr. Obama met in Chicago with one-time rival Hillary Rodham Clinton. Some top Obama advisors are pushing her for secretary of state. Neither side would discuss the details of the conversation.

Amid two wars and an economic crisis, Mr. Obama must cement support in Red States he flipped and Blue States he struggled in, placate liberal activists and minority groups whose electoral boost was crucial, and form a government that looks like the change he promised.

"Obama has the most complicated calculus for selecting a cabinet of any recent president," said Paul Light, a public-policy professor at New York University and longtime adviser on presidential transitions.

A little more than a week after his election victory, Mr. Obama's team is further along than outward appearance might suggest, said Clay Johnson, a deputy White House budget director who was executive director of President George W. Bush's 2000-2001 transition and is helping Mr. Obama's. Mr. Bush and President Ronald Reagan set a record of 25 cabinet and subcabinet posts filled by April 1 of their first years in office. The Obama team is aiming for 100 to 150 by that date.

To help get them there, the Bush team has worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to expand its capacity to do background checks. In 2001, it took an average of 60 days to get a nominee's name to the Senate after presidential approval. The Obama team, with White House assistance, is aiming for a maximum of 30 days.

"There will be three times to four times more personnel decisions in the opening weeks of this transition than any president-elect has ever faced," Mr. Johnson said.

More than 300 cabinet secretaries, deputies and assistant secretaries and more than 2,500 political appointees will be picked. About 144,000 applications came in through the Obama transition team's change.gov Web site within five days of its creation.

All incoming presidents face a tricky balancing act as they build their government. But Mr. Obama's task is especially tough, in part because he was politically adept at appealing to partisan Democrats and centrists alike. If he keeps Republican Robert Gates as secretary of defense, for instance, he will likely have to placate angry liberals with a more left-leaning secretary of state. Sen. Clinton, of New York, could be a crowd pleaser in that role, and she has staunch advocates in Rahm Emanuel, the new chief of staff, and transition director John Podesta, according to Democrats familiar with the transition process.

But Mr. Obama risks alienating Latino supporters if he passes over New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, currently the favorite of a lobbying campaign by Hispanic activists, for the State Department job.

"It leads you into a downward spiral that ends up pleasing nobody," said Leon Panetta, a chief of staff in the Clinton White House who witnessed just such a "circus" in President Clinton's transition of 1992-93.

Two other Bush appointees, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and Director of Central Intelligence Michael Hayden, also would like to stay on in their jobs. But some Senate Democrats are pushing hard for their removal, citing policy disagreements over warrantless surveillance and interrogation policies.

Even before a single name has emerged, Mr. Obama's would-be cabinet is under fire. The liberal Web site Huffington Post is waging war on the idea of keeping Mr. Gates at the Pentagon.

Perhaps no potential nominee is taking more heat than Harvard University economist Lawrence Summers, a potential pick as Treasury secretary. Mr. Summers served in that post for President Clinton and has moved to a position of prominence in Mr. Obama's economic team. Women's groups are particularly distressed about his possible appointment, recalling comments he made as Harvard president that innate characteristics may prevent women from achieving more prominence in science.

"The American electorate has changed the course of history by demonstrating that an African-American can do anything. We hope that the messages of the Obama presidency will be broader than that -- that any American can do anything. That includes women," said an anti-Summers broadside from the Rosalind Franklin Society, an honors group for women in biosciences.

Labor groups and liberal economists are suspicious of Mr. Summers's free-market principles, which helped guide a deregulation of the financial-services industry at the end of the Clinton era.

"It would be a really bad start to his administration if President Obama picked a Treasury secretary who shares a substantial part of the blame for the bubble economy and the financial crisis," liberal economist Dean Baker recently wrote.

But Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, took a swipe at Mr. Summers's chief rival for the post, New York Federal Reserve Bank President Timothy Geithner, who, he made clear, is an unknown quantity to labor.

"I always worry about somebody who has spent his whole life at the Federal Reserve," Mr. Stern said, plugging a new name for consideration, New Jersey governor and former Goldman Sachs chairman Jon Corzine.



http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122669636685629301.html
 
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