Obama Team Takes Shape, Includes One-time Rival Hillary Clinton

With more people losing their jobs, plummeting stock prices and further declines in the housing market, President-elect Barack Obama held a series of press conferences last week to show that his administration will "hit the ground running."

Obama tackles the economy first

	Obama chose New York Federal Reserve president Tim Geithner to be his Treasury Secretary, an appointment that must be approved by the Senate.

By naming a team deeply experienced in dealing with financial crises --Geithner was heavily involved in the efforts to stabilize one of the nation's largest banks, Citigroup-- Mr. Obama emphasized his determination to help Americans regain confidence in the economy.

"With our economy in distress, we cannot hesitate and we cannot delay. Our families can't afford to keep on waiting and hoping for a solution. They can't afford to watch another month of unpaid bills pile up, another semester of tuition slip out of reach, another month where, instead of saving for retirement, they're dipping into their savings just to get by," he said.

Obama relies on many from Clinton years

	Many bureaucrats who served under President Bill Clinton's term, from 1993 to 2001, will now serve in the Obama administration.

"They're very competent people, very experienced people, but at the same time that experience means they've been to some extent implicated in the problems that got us here," Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research said on the NewsHour.

"I mean, taking Larry Summers as one example, he was a supporter of the financial deregulation that, you know, helped to fuel the housing bubble. I should point out he also didn't think that financial asset bubbles like the stock bubble and housing bubble were a big problem," Baker said.

But conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks is impressed by the new president's choices. 

"Every other president has had a coterie of people around them from the time they were governor or something else that they bring to town either from Arkansas or Texas or wherever.  Obama, because he's so new and inexperienced, doesn't have that coterie. So he really is not picking cronies. He really is picking people who are indisputably qualified," Brooks said on the NewsHour.

Hillary in the Cabinet

	President-elect Obama has asked Senator Hillary Clinton to be his Secretary of State, one of the most important Cabinet positions.

While analysts such as Brooks say Clinton would make a very good head of the State Department, the move is attracting strong attention because the two often had heated debates over foreign policy during the Democratic primaries.

He often criticized her for supporting the Iraq War and she called his proposal to meet with the leaders of Iran and Venezuela "naïve."

Taking cues from Lincoln and FDR

	President-elect Obama said that President Abraham Lincoln, who included his main political rivals in his Cabinet, is one of his role models.

In a recent CBS interview, the president-elect said he's been spending a lot of time reading up on Lincoln, and that he was finishing reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's 2005 book "Team of Rivals."

That book tells the story of how Lincoln, after a hard fought, often-bitter campaign, chose for his cabinet some of the very men who had battled so hard to win the presidency themselves--in part as a way of controlling them, but also to learn from their differing perspectives.

"There is a wisdom there and a humility about his approach to government, even before he was president, that I just find very helpful," Obama said.

When asked whether he would be willing to put political enemies in his Cabinet as Lincoln did, Obama responded, "Well, I tell you what, I find him a very wise man."

Mr. Obama also said he is taking cues from Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

"There's a new book out about FDR's first 100 days and what you see in FDR that I hope my team can -- emulate, is not always getting it right, but projecting a sense of confidence, and a willingness to try things. And experiment in order to get people working again," he said.

In his first 100 days in office, FDR introduced 15 major pieces of legislation and created dozens of federal programs called "the alphabet agencies" such as the NRA, the WPA, the CCC, the PWA -- all part of the New Deal.