New White House Has Unseen Influences
When Barack Obama walks into the White House Tuesday, three of the most important figures in his new administration won't be with him. Technically, they won't be members of his administration at all.
These influential figures are Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Robert Rubin, the progenitors of many of the people and ideas that will populate the Obama years. None of the three has a direct role in the proceedings, at least for now.
Yet it's no exaggeration to say their influence will be felt every day. If Lincoln's ghost still hovers over the White House family quarters, as some believe, the Clinton/Gore/Rubin spirit now surely hovers over the offices of the West Wing.
The mere fact that these leading lights of the last Democratic administration -- the president, vice president and Treasury secretary who dominated Washington in the 1990s -- are playing such a role means this transfer of power is markedly different from the one that occurred the last time a new Democrat moved into the White House. That, of course, was when Mr. Clinton took power in 1993.
At that point, the imperative for Team Clinton was to try hard not to look like the previous Democratic administration, the one run by Jimmy Carter. The Carter years were widely viewed as unhappy ones, marked by a bad economy and embarrassments abroad, and topped off by a humiliating defeat at the polls. Things Carter were to be kept at arm's length.
Today's situation is quite different. The Clinton years were marked by an impeachment and controversies galore, but Mr. Clinton ultimately left office carrying a good economic record, a budget in the black and high popularity. Harking back to the Clinton times is acceptable -- in some cases even desirable -- for Mr. Obama. 'The fact of the matter is that they have what we didn't have in '92 and '93, which is a usable past,' says William Galston, a political and policy scholar who was part of that Clinton team. 'Not to make use of it would be crazy.'
So, Mr. Obama is making use of it. Start with Mr. Gore.
Though the former vice president's influence gets the least attention, it may be the most striking. Because the smoldering economy and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan soak up so much attention, relatively little attention has been paid to how much members of the Obama energy and environment teams figure to try to shake up the status quo -- and how much Mr. Gore's fingerprints are on their thinking.
His influence starts with the woman who is going to be the White House energy and environment 'czar,' Carol Browner. She cut her teeth as a staffer in the office of then-Sen. Gore, before running the Environmental Protection Agency in the Clinton years. The Gore lineage extends from there. Just as Ms. Browner worked for Mr. Gore, so the new head of the EPA, Lisa Jackson, and the new head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, Nancy Sutley, once worked for Ms. Browner at the EPA.
Moreover, Mr. Obama's choice for energy secretary, Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist from the University of California at Berkeley, places a Gore-like emphasis on climate change and alternative fuels. 'These are people who believe firmly in the kind of environmental agenda that Al Gore has developed and advocated, and they appear to me to be in favor of the boldest possible action as fast as we can conceivably do it, given budget constraints,' says Mr. Galston.
On economics, Mr. Rubin's impact is easy to see, merely by looking at those at the new president's elbow in dealing with the recession. (Mr. Rubin himself might well be one of those people at the president's side, if not for the time he spent as a highly paid executive of Citigroup, which played its own inglorious role in the meltdown of the financial market in recent months.)
Rubin proteges have been picked to fill the most important economic seats: Treasury Secretary-designate Timothy Geithner, National Economic Council head Lawrence Summers, budget-director-to-be Peter Oszag and White House economic aide Jason Furman all worked for Mr. Rubin in the Clinton Treasury.
It's hard to know precisely how much of Rubinomics itself actually will carry into Obama policies. The hallmark of Mr. Rubin's time in office -- attacking the federal deficit -- is distinctly out of sync with the current era, in which deficit spending to energize the economy is considered a virtue. But the Rubin ancestry tells you the Obama team, down deep, carries some deficit-hawk genes that should re-emerge later.
That leaves the former president himself. Mr. Clinton's most obvious personal connection to the Obama team comes in the person of his wife, incoming Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. More broadly, he groomed many of the centrists -- notably White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel -- who now, somewhat to the chagrin of liberal Democrats, fill important Obama posts.
But Mr. Clinton's influence runs deeper. As Mr. Galston notes, the former president took Democrats to the center on two racially charged social issues -- welfare reform and crime -- and virtually took those issues off the table as political hot potatoes. That liberated Mr. Obama.
A couple of other Clinton policy legacies -- balanced budgets and free trade -- aren't so much in vogue. There is a broader Clinton lesson Mr. Obama seems to have absorbed: Pragmatism and a bit of centrism go a long way in helping a Democratic president succeed.
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