Can Barack Obama play the lion-tamer and rein in his big beasts? Trouble may lurk ahead in the way that he intends to run the grander fiefdoms of his administration. Start with foreign policy, where Hillary Clinton at the state department, Robert Gates at the Pentagon, Leon Panetta at the CIA and Jim Jones, who as national security adviser is based in the White House, will all be growling from their separate dens. Off to one side is vice-president Joe Biden, who as former chairman of the senate foreign relations committee reckons that he knows more about foreign affairs than the rest combined.
Clinton's loyalists are muttering about the "military axis" of Jones, a former Marine general, and the Pentagon. The buzz is that Hillary insisted that Panetta (Bill Clinton's former chief of staff) replace General Mike Hayden at the CIA on the grounds that too many prominent generals would send the wrong message.
On the other hand, the many disappointed hopefuls among Obama's 300-odd foreign policy campaign advisers are starting to express their resentment in leaks. One of them has blasted the "determined and co-ordinated effort by Hillary Clinton and her team to maximise their power and position in the administration." Some of the blame is being attached to John Podesta, a former Clinton staffer who got the job of running the transition team as part of Obama's peace treaty with Hillary. There are also bitter claims that Panetta should not get the CIA job because while in the White House he approved the principle of rendition, sending bad guys off to friendly regimes with unfriendly methods of interrogation.
But it's worse in the finance fiefdom. There centrist Tim Geithner will be treasury secretary, moderate Keynesian Larry Summers will run the National Economic Council and veteran inflation-fighter and monetarist Paul Volcker will chair the president's Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Bush appointee Ben Bernanke stays on as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board until next year.
Summers—a former treasury secretary and no shrinking violet—is determined to succeed Bernanke, so expect nasty sniping. It could start with the lawsuit that Bloomberg has filed against the Fed. Bernanke tripled the Fed's balance sheet to $2.3 trillion by accepting some dubious assets as collateral against the vast waves of liquidity that he poured into the markets. Bloomberg is demanding under the Freedom of Information Act that the Fed specify what kind of "mortgage security" collateral it has taken from the banks. So far, the Fed is stonewalling. If the White House weighs in against the Fed, Summers will be behind it.
And if that wasn't already too many cooks, Obama loyalist Austan Goolsbee will wear two hats, one at the White House council of economic advisers and the other as staff director of Volcker's recovery board. Goolsbee is a progressive centrist and a Keynesian, one of the leading lights of the new social-behavioural economics and a talented stand-up comic in his spare time. He made his academic reputation by demolishing the Reaganite mantra that tax cuts made the rich spend more. Goolsbee knows Washington and, more than any of the other economists, he has the president's ear.
Hamilton picks up Kissinger's baton
An era has passed, and so has a baton. Having served or advised or delivered discreet messages for seven presidents, Henry Kissinger has been replaced as wise old guru by Lee Hamilton, former chairman of the House international relations committee and better known these days for running the 9/11 commission.
Hamilton, now director of the bipartisan Woodrow Wilson Centre, organised a dinner-seminar for Obama just before the inauguration. The attendees were a group of middle east and Islamic experts, including Wilson Centre fellow Haleh Esfandiari, who spent months in an Iranian jail two years ago. Hamilton also arranged for Taliban expert Ahmed Rashid to fly in from Lahore for the event. Obama told Hamilton that he was feeling the White House bubble closing in on him and needed outside voices. Hamilton and his increasingly influential Wilson Centre will provide that.
Changing the guard and the menu
Naturally there are other changes afoot. The White House mess has been asked to serve family-friendly meals at weekends and evenings, so that staffers can meet their families for dinner while still putting in 16-hour workdays. The idea emerged from the transition team, who kept hearing from Clinton administration veterans that his style of working into the early hours had resulted in broken marriages and alienated children. Michelle Obama said this meant that the White House had to become open to families—and besides, it would be good for her daughters to have other kids around.
Finally, since its inception in 2003, this column has been written by "Tumbler," in deference to the eerily prophetic secret service codename of former President George W Bush. So after all his fumbles, stumbles and tumbles, the pen name is changing in salute to the new incumbent. It will for the foreseeable future be "Renegade"—which, as you may agree, sounds a lot better.
