Obama Team Takes Two Shapes

[question everything]

DECEMBER 19, 2008

Obama Team Takes Two Shapes
By GERALD F. SEIB
WSJ


The president-elect is giving the country two administrations for the price of one. The first, composed of Mr. Obama's initial wave of high-profile appointees, is full of familiar Washington veterans. This is the team that pleased moderates and even some Republicans, reassured financial markets -- and made the party's liberals complain about "retreads" and wonder what all that change rhetoric was about. The second wave of appointments, most coming in the past week or so, is composed of lesser-known names, new faces and, all told, the kind of folks who look like thefabled "agents of change" promised in the campaign.

Just about everybody knew the names in the first wave: Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Paul Volcker and Lawrence Summers. But how many people knew before this month the names Arne Duncan of Chicago, Steven Chu of Berkeley and Lisa Jackson of Trenton? They are, respectively, Mr. Obama's designated education secretary, energy secretary and Environmental Protection Agency administrator. It's no coincidence the rollout of the new administration worked out this way, Obama aides say. The old faces are grouped in the economics and national-security camps, an effort by Mr. Obama to send reassuring signals at a time of war and economic upheaval. The message to markets and the world: no on-the-job training in those areas amid crisis.

The new faces, by contrast, are most notable in the areas of energy and the environment. The signal there: Big changes are coming -- or at least being sought -- on America's energy profile and its approach to climate change. This mix of old and new, representatives of continuity and agents of change, is in keeping with the No Drama Obama style, which eschews jerky motions to one side or the other. It also has brought forth a team that is difficult to pigeon-hole ideologically, just as the candidate was. It screams the word increasingly attached to the president-elect himself: pragmatic.

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The Obama team that's taking shape is hardly going to please everyone. Despite a lot of talk of bipartisanship, it isn't terribly bipartisan; it has just two Republicans, Mr. LaHood and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who is remaining in place, and who is as much an independent as a partisan. The South is under-represented. Liberals still have an uneasy feeling they are under-represented. But the most striking characteristic of the emerging cast of characters is this mix of old and new faces. What the two camps have in common is a general lack of obvious ideological fervor. Ms. Jackson, for example, is a Princeton-educated chemical engineer who worked previously in the EPA, the agency she is now to head, later ran New Jersey's main environmental regulator, then became chief of staff for Gov. Jon Corzine. She fits the mold of other Corzine appointees, known more as technocrats than ideologues. In fact, though she's clearly a Democrat, her choice was opposed by some in the Democrat-friendly environmental community in her state.

The real prototype of Obama appointees, though, may be Mr. Duncan, the Chicago schools chief who is to become education secretary. A Harvard graduate, onetime professional basketball player in Australia, and friend of the president-to-be, Mr. Duncan has managed to build a reputation as a school reformer without winning the enmity of the teachers unions that often resist school reforms. How did he do that? "He's a little bit of a Rorschach figure; you can read into him what you want," says Chester Finn, a conservative education expert who served in the Reagan education department yet praises the Duncan selection. He calls Mr. Duncan a "rounded-edges kind of guy" who has "closed some schools but hasn't had mass layoffs" among teachers. "He's a pragmatist, I guess," Mr. Finn concludes. At this point, at least, that seems an apt description of much of the emerging Team Obama.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122963694275719607.html (subscription)