CHICAGO — President-elect Barack Obama moved swiftly on Thursday to fill his administration and form his response to the economic crisis. Mr. Obama scheduled his first post-election visit to the White House and convened an economic advisory board to meet here amid signs of a deteriorating financial outlook.
With the global economy on a knife’s edge, and labor figures on Friday very likely to show mounting American job losses, the financial markets, foreign leaders and even the Bush administration are looking to Mr. Obama for signs of how he will manage the crisis.
In responding, Mr. Obama must strike a delicate balance between cooperating with an unpopular president whose policies he campaigned to change, and the inclination to wait until he takes charge in two and a half months to prescribe his own remedies.
Adding to the pressure were steep drops in world financial markets on Thursday; the Dow Jones industrial average alone fell 443 points, or nearly 5 percent, compiling a two-day loss of nearly 1,000 points.
Moving quickly on the transition, Mr. Obama announced his selection of Representative Rahm Emanuel as his White House chief of staff. The president-elect said he had made that choice because Mr. Emanuel had “deep insights into the challenging economic issues that will be front and center for our administration.”
In a long list of forthcoming appointments, aides said, Mr. Obama is acting with the greatest urgency toward choosing a Treasury secretary and is said to be considering Lawrence H. Summers, who held the post during the Clinton administration, and Timothy F. Geithner, president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank.
Even as Mr. Obama moved toward assuming power, he was building on his commanding victory on Tuesday. He added North Carolina to his column, according an analysis of the election returns by The New York Times, capping an extraordinary campaign in a state that had not voted for a Democrat for president since 1976.
The vote totals in North Carolina showed 49.9 percent for Mr. Obama and 49.5 percent for Senator John McCain, who was his Republican opponent. In his election to be the nation’s 44th president, Mr. Obama had 364 electoral votes to Mr. McCain’s 162, with 12 still to be decided — 11 in Missouri and one in Nebraska.
Mr. Obama announced that he would hold his first post-election news conference on Friday afternoon, but he remained largely out of sight on Thursday as a newly fortified Secret Service detail spirited him through Chicago. He arrived at the Federal Bureau of Investigation regional headquarters here to receive his first president’s daily brief from Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence.
The transfer of power took place on two fronts, with President Bush summoning members of the White House staff to the South Lawn, where he pledged to make an “unprecedented effort” to ensure a smooth transition in the first handover of the presidency since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Mr. Bush said he would welcome Mr. Obama at the White House on Monday, the earliest such meeting after any recent presidential election.
“We face economic challenges that will not pause to let a new president settle in,” Mr. Bush said. “This will also be America’s first wartime transition in four decades.”
Mr. Obama, who has declined to attend the president’s global economic summit meeting on Nov. 15, said he looked forward to meeting with Mr. Bush and the first lady, Laura Bush, at what might be the only get-together by the president and his successor before Inauguration Day.
“I thank him for reaching out in the spirit of bipartisanship that will be required to meet the many challenges we face as a nation,” said Mr. Obama, adding that his wife, Michelle, will join him as he visits the Oval Office and the rest of their future residence. Their two daughters will not be taken out of school for the trip.
No incoming president in modern times has been so pressured to begin governing, in effect, before he is sworn into office. With that in mind, Mr. Obama and Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. will meet on Friday with members of a new economic advisory board.
The group, assembled to offer wide-ranging advice, includes the billionaire investor Warren Buffett; Mr. Summers and his predecessor as Treasury secretary, Robert E. Rubin; Paul A. Volcker, a former Federal Reserve chairman; and Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google.
Participants will also include Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa of Los Angeles and Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm of Michigan.
Ms. Granholm is a strong proponent of a stimulus package in the lame-duck Congressional session. Previewing her advice to Mr. Obama, she sent a letter on Thursday to Congressional leaders urging them to finance public infrastructure projects, extend unemployment and food stamp benefits and provide aid to states and more assistance for the troubled auto industry.
“Michigan, and every state, needs swift action and leadership from Washington to address the short term challenges our national and state economies are facing,” Ms. Granholm wrote.
While Mr. Obama is focusing heavily on the economy, advisers said he is working on all areas of his administration. He spent Thursday afternoon making and receiving calls, his time divided with the same precise scheduling he used during his highly disciplined presidential campaign.
In a makeshift office in Chicago, he also spoke to nine world leaders, including President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.
Mr. Obama is trying to build his team amid the fevered speculation that typically grips Washington during times of transition about who will fill the new administration, where names are often floated with little bearing on the actual selection process.
For example, some in Washington focused on reports that Mr. Obama might name former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, a Republican who endorsed him before the election, as his education secretary. But one of Mr. Powell’s closest friends shot that idea down Thursday.
“Fuhgeddaboutit,” Kenneth M. Duberstein, a former Reagan White House chief of staff, said in his best Brooklyn accent. “What he has told everybody is he is not a candidate for anything.”
Mr. Obama, however, was set to place two of his top advisers near him in the Oval Office. David Axelrod is going to assume a position of senior adviser to the president, officials said, and Robert Gibbs is poised to be named White House press secretary.
On the economy, Mr. Obama is working with Democratic leaders in Congress who are making plans for two stimulus packages. The first would be smaller, perhaps up to $100 billion, to be passed in a lame-duck session this month in hopes of getting Mr. Bush’s signature. The second would be larger, including tax cuts for low- and middle-income workers, to be ready as soon as late January.
Mr. Obama is coordinating with Congressional Democrats behind the scenes on the stimulus plans, which would include more jobless benefits, food stamps, aid to financially strapped states and cities, and spending for infrastructure projects that keep people at work. His chief liaison has been Mr. Emanuel.
“You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid,” Mr. Emanuel said in an interview. “In 1974 and 1978 we never dealt with it, and our dependence on foreign oil never changed.”
Although the cooperation with the Democratic-controlled Congress is expected to go smoothly, the coordination with the Bush White House is a dicier matter. The Obama camp is feeling pressure from the administration, according to several people familiar with the situation, specifically from Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., to “co-own” the bailout program, which remains unpopular among voters despite a broad consensus that it was essential to avert wider economic collapse.
The Treasury has reserved office space, so far unused, for Obama representatives. Mr. Paulson has sought Mr. Obama’s advice into the choice of a permanent director of the bailout program, and a commitment that Mr. Obama, once he is president, will keep the person on.
No decisions have been made about how Mr. Obama should proceed, advisers say, and Friday’s session with the Obama economic board is not expected to settle matters. Having promised change, Mr. Obama is not eager to join hands with Mr. Bush on the bailout.
But several Democrats said for Mr. Obama to stay aloof, as Franklin D. Roosevelt did before he succeeded Herbert Hoover amid the Depression, or to criticize the actions of the Bush administration could further destabilize financial markets as they seek clarity about the government’s policies. It would also mean that the Bush administration might take actions that would bind Mr. Obama’s hands as president.
A Treasury spokeswoman, Brookly McLaughlin, in an interview disputed the suggestions that Mr. Paulson was pressuring the Obama camp. Ms. McLaughlin cited a public statement from Mr. Paulson on Thursday in which he congratulated Mr. Obama and added, “A methodical and orderly transition is in the best interests of the financial markets, and Treasury is committed to making sure that the incoming team can hit the ground running in January.”
Jeff Zeleny reported from Chicago, and Jackie Calmes from Washington. Peter Baker contributed reporting from Washington.http://my.barackobama.com/page/dashboard/public/gGWdjc
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment