After a Decisive Victory, Obama Chooses Transition Team as Challenges Loom
With his history-making election behind him, President-elect Barack Obama was moving ahead with his transition on Wednesday as he prepared to confront the daunting challenges that he will have to face as president in just 76 days, amid two wars and the gravest economic crisis to afflict the country since the Great Depression.
Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, a former aide to President Bill Clinton and a close friend of Mr. Obama, has been offered the post of White House chief of staff and is expected to accept, according to Democrats familiar with the process.
Mr. Obama announced in a written statement the three co-chairs of his transition team on Wednesday — John D. Podesta, a former Clinton chief of staff; Valerie Jarrett, a longtime Obama adviser; and Pete Rouse, Mr. Obama’s Senate chief of staff.
After getting in a morning workout, Mr. Obama arrived on Wednesday afternoon at an office building in downtown Chicago for what aides said would be five hours worth of meetings and calls with officials helping to guide his transition, as well as conversations with people he is considering for his cabinet.
Mr. Emanuel, who as chairman of the Democratic caucus is the fourth-ranking House member, has told associates that he was leaning toward stepping down from his position to join Mr. Obama’s team. But aides said an agreement was not yet final, and no announcements were scheduled for Wednesday.
Mr. Emanuel has a reputation as a hard-nosed political operator, who would bring extensive legislative experience and veteran instincts for how to get things done in the White House, but his brash partisan past could run afoul of Mr. Obama’s promises to be a mediator in Washington.
Mr. Obama is expected to remain in Chicago, where he is basing his transition, at least until the end of the week. Campaign workers at his Chicago headquarters were told to take the morning off and not to show up until noon. Many are scrambling to sort out their own futures, hoping for roles in the new administration.
A slew of people were named Wednesday to serve on an advisory board for Mr. Obama’s transition, including William Daley, a former secretary of commerce; Michael Froman, an executive at Citigroup, former treasury department official and former classmate of Mr. Obama’s at Harvard Law School; Julius Genachowski, another former law school classmate, former chief counsel to the Federal Communications Communications and one of the Obama campaign’s biggest fund-raisers; and Susan E. Rice, a former Clinton administration official and senior foreign policy advisor to the Obama campaign.
Chris Lu, Mr. Obama’s legislative director in the Senate, was named executive director of the transition team.
President Bush offered his congratulations to Mr. Obama in public remarks on Wednesday morning, and pledged to cooperate fully and keep the President-elect informed of important decisions.
“No matter how they cast their ballots, all Americans can be proud of the history that was made yesterday,” President Bush said. “They showed a watching world the vitality of American democracy and the strides that have been made toward a more perfect union.”
“The long campaign has now ended,” he added. “We move forward as a nation.”
But some aspects of the election were still unresolved on Wednesday. While The Associated Press reported that Mr. Obama was leading Senator John McCain in the popular vote, 52.3 percent to 46.4 percent, with most of the precincts reporting, North Carolina and Missouri were too close to call. Without those contests, Mr. Obama had 349 electoral votes to Mr. McCain’s 162. Indiana, which was running very close into the early hours Wednesday morning, was narrowly won by Mr. Obama.
Michael McDonald, a professor and voting expert at George Mason University, estimated the popular vote total would reach133.3 million, after hundreds of thousands of absentee and provisional ballots that are still outstanding are finally counted, eclipsing the roughly 123 million voters who turned out in 2004. Mr. McDonald said there may be nearly a half million outstanding ballots in Georgia alone, and thousands more in other states — including the one with the largest turnout, California — that are still being counted.
Based on early figures, Mr. McDonald projected about 62.5 percent of all eligible voters cast ballots, just shy of the 62.6 percent figure that was recorded in the 1964 election. But that figure could very well rise as the remaining votes are finally counted.
“That’s just my sense in how this has gone in the past,” Mr. McDonald said.
The General Services Administration has already set up a 120,000-square-foot transition office for Mr. Obama’s team in downtown Washington. And F.B.I. officials have been conducting background checks on a list of people provided by the Obama campaign, as well as Senator John McCain’s staff, so they could be granted interim security clearances on Wednesday, administration officials have said.
In contrast, Republican leaders began on Wednesday what will probably be a long period of re-evaluation as Democrats hope to shape a long-term realignment of the electoral map. Not only did Mr. Obama capture the presidency, but he led his party to sharp gains in Congress. This puts Democrats in control of the House, the Senate and the White House for the first time since 1995, when Bill Clinton was in office.
“Certainly, we have to examine this,” Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Texas Republican, said on CNN on Wednesday. “We have to listen to what the people are saying if we’re going to be a forceful voice.”
For their part, Mr. Obama’s supporters continued to revel on Wednesday in the moment, reflecting on its extraordinary symbolism against the backdrop of the nation’s fraught racial history.
Colin Powell, the former secretary of state in the Bush administration who endorsed Mr. Obama, became emotional on Wednesday in an interview with CNN from Hong Kong, confessing that he and his family wept when Mr. Obama was declared the winner.
“I have to share in the pride that Americans have now for the fact America did this,” said Mr. Powell, one of the country’s most prominent black leaders.
Mr. Powell added that he believed this was a time for “deep introspection on the part of the Republican Party.”
“They have to take a very realistic look at themselves — we do — I am a Republican, and see where we went wrong, where we aren’t attaching ourselves to the hopes, dreams and ambitions of the American people,” he said.
The current secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, told reporters: “As an African-American, I’m especially proud because this is a country that has been through a long journey in terms of overcoming wrongs and making race not the factor in our lives. That work is not done, but yesterday was obviously an extraordinary step forward.”
But even as they celebrated, Mr. Obama’s supporters offered sober reflections of what lay ahead.
“We’re in deep trouble,” Representative John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat and leader in the civil rights movement, on NBC’s “Today” show.
“We’ve got to get our economy out of the ditch, end the war in Iraq and bring our young men and women home, provide health care for all our citizens,” Mr. Lewis said. “And he’s going to call on us, I believe, to sacrifice. We all must give up something.”
The election of Mr. Obama amounted to a national catharsis — a repudiation of a historically unpopular Republican president and his economic and foreign policies, and an embrace of Mr. Obama’s call for a change in the direction and the tone of the country.
But it was also an exorcism of sorts of some of the most divisive episodes of the country’s history with regard to African Americans. It was a moment unthinkable even just two years ago.
Mr. Obama, 47, a first-term senator from Illinois, defeated Mr. McCain of Arizona, 72, a former prisoner of war who was making his second bid for the presidency.
To the very end, Mr. McCain’s campaign was eclipsed by an opponent who was nothing short of a phenomenon, drawing huge crowds epitomized by the tens of thousands of people who turned out to hear Mr. Obama’s victory speech in Grant Park in Chicago.
Mr. McCain also fought the headwinds of a relentlessly hostile political environment, weighted down with the baggage left to him by President Bush and an economic collapse that took place in the middle of the general election campaign.
“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer,” said Mr. Obama, standing before a huge wooden lectern with a row of American flags at his back, casting his eyes to a crowd that stretched far into the Chicago night.
“It’s been a long time coming,” the president-elect added, “but tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment, change has come to America.”
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