The PDQ Presidency

Election night 2008 went late in Chicago. Many campaign staffers who had spent two years helping Barack Obama get elected celebrated in Grant Park until the wee hours. But if senior aides were under the impression they might get the following day off, they were mistaken. Obama's transition director, John Podesta, scheduled a senior staff meeting for the next morning, Wednesday, Nov. 5, at 10:30 a.m. Podesta, Bill Clinton's former chief of staff, figured it would take a half hour, 45 minutes tops, to bat around some scheduling options and maybe even tell a few war stories from the campaign. But the soon-to-be commander in chief had other plans. To him, Wednesday was another workday—or, more precisely, the first day of his presidency.

Obama had been secretly plotting his transition since the spring of 2008. He enjoyed reciting the line from the 1972 movie The Candidate in which Robert Redford turns to an aide just after winning the election and mournfully asks, "What do we do now?" Obama insisted that he would not be that man. He had launched a massive transition project involving more than 200 policy wonks offering advice. Everyone knew Obama intended to get going quickly after the election. They just didn't expect that "quickly" to Obama meant hours, not days. Podesta was stunned when the 30-minute meeting turned into a four-and-a-half-hour planning session. On day one, Obama was prepared to narrow most of his cabinet choices to two or three names and move ahead to big policy decisions.

Normally a new presidency begins with the inauguration in January. But Barack Obama's tenure really started in November, a full year ago, when he became the de facto co-president of the United States. Obama couldn't yet sign bills or issue executive orders. He and his family couldn't sleep in the White House. Having resigned from the Senate, he was technically a private citizen— a man with no constitutional authority. But these were formalities. For the first time in modern American history, an incoming president made some of the most important decisions of his term—about the economy, mainly, but also about energy, education, and health care—before taking office. If "to govern is to choose," as John F. Kennedy said, then Obama was already governing.

"We only have one president at a time," Obama insisted repeatedly before he was inaugurated. While this was the right thing to say, it wasn't really true. During the 1932–33 transition, as the banks collapsed and the nation slid deeper into the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt said something similar and he meant it. FDR refused to cooperate with outgoing president Herbert Hoover in rescuing the financial system, and he made no decisions before his inaugural about how he planned to stimulate the economy. He even spent an important stretch of the transition on a yacht. Obama considered that approach and rejected it (though he did take a Hawaii vacation). He decided to work with President Bush on the TARP bank bailout, and he committed the nation to hundreds of billions in stimulus spending in a recovery bill to be signed not long after he was sworn in.

The big question for Obama was how large his recovery package would be. In early December, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell suggested a pie-in-the-sky stimulus of $165 billion and was amazed when Obama didn't bat an eye. In fact, the president-elect and his team had already agreed on a figure twice that size. Then they more than doubled it again, to about $800 billion—so that the cost went past what had been spent by the United States over five years in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama's leadership style falls somewhere between Bill Clinton's wide--ranging deliberations and George W. Bush's snap judgments. His ability to integrate complex facts, summarize competing arguments, then announce a crisp decision impressed the more experienced officials around him, including Joe Biden. After one conference call about the economy in early December, the vice president–elect and two-time presidential candidate told his aide Ron Klain, "We got this ticket in the right order."

But the breakneck pace carried a price. Many so-called shovel-ready construction projects often weren't actually ready to go. Had Obama taken a bit more time, he might have been able to think harder about job creation, which has become the big economic challenge of late 2009. During the transition, Obama officials failed to persuade congressional Democrats to offer tax credits to employers for each new person they hired. And his economists rejected WPA-style government hiring programs out of hand. So when unemployment later approached double digits, they were caught without a backup plan.