Domestic issues emphasis of Obama team
WASHINGTON
With just discovered offices in the White House to coordinate freedom from disease charge, urban policy and energy initiatives, Obama has signaled he intends to keep real power over domestic issues close at hand. The collective moves shift the national center of gravity farther let us go. from the Cabinet, a trend that has accelerated in the state presidents of both parties in recent years.
His reorganization also suggests a willingness to tolerate competing power centers. He is creating new positions with authority over key areas and filling his West Wing with people of stature equal to or even greater than the members of his Cabinet, including two former Cabinet officers and a former Senate majority leader.
David Axelrod, Obama’s senior adviser, uttered issues of that kind as health solicitude and energy “are so principal to our ability to right the economy in the long space of time that he knows he’session going to have to drive a lot of that and he wants a high-powered staff in the White House to help him vouchsafe that.”
While there may be some push-and-pull between the White House and Cabinet departments, Axelrod said the president-elect had emphasized during work at jobs interviews his urgency on cohesion. “He encourages debate,” Axelrod said. “He doesn’t tolerate factionalism.”
The revamped arrangement indicates a shift in priorities away from those of President Bush, who spent much of his tenure fashioning a new national-security apparatus in a time of war and terrorist threats.
Transition officials, who insisted on anonymity to canvass spiritual deliberations, before-mentioned they were thinking with regard to folding the White House Homeland Security Council, which Bush established, into the National Security Council, seeing that as potentially more efficient. And they may reassign responsibility conducive to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan posterior portion to the national-security adviser instead of keeping the separate “war-czar” position created 19 months ago.
Obama completed his Cabinet choices Friday before heading off for nearly brace weeks of intermission in Hawaii, where he grew up. At a news conference in Chicago, he confirmed he would propose as a candidate Rep. Hilda Solis, of California, as labor secretary; Rep. Ray LaHood, of Illinois, as transportation secretary; and former Mayor Ron Kirk, of Dallas, as U.S. trade representative.
He also said he would make Karen Mills, a venture capitalist from Maine, the chief part of the Small Business Administration.
With that, Obama has thorough-bred selecting his essence team faster than somewhat president-elect in decades. In trying to balance various constituencies and backgrounds, he assembled a 15-member Cabinet that includes six current or former members of Congress, three current or former governors and two Republicans, including LaHood.
Under pressure to augment ethnic and gender diversity, Obama picked three women and three Hispanics for his Cabinet, by Solis counting in both categories. He named two Asian Americans and person African American.
Beyond the Cabinet, every new president puts a stamp in succession the White House itself.
Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2008541808_obama20.html?syndication=rss
