Opinion: Full video of President-elect Obama’s new economic recovery steps

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Just in case you missed it when he said it the last two days, President-elect Barack Obama announced again today that the nation confronts an economic crisis of historic proportions.

So he took this priceless third occasion on daytime national television on the eve of a happy family holiday to name more people to help him start a new presidential administration of historic proportions that is each day beginning to build public expectations of historic proportions, well before Jan. 20. (See videos below.)

It is a brilliantly structured rollout of a new administration before an attentive, eager and curious public so tired of the old one.

It’s rather like the interregnum Cabinet-formation days of the Kennedy Administration in late 1960 as the new faces came and went from the president-elect’s Georgetown home and the public contemplated the exciting start of a new era of grace and youth after two terms under old, too-familiar faces in the other party.

Obama’s savvy strategy shows the experienced, scarred hands of Rahm Emanuel, the newly named White House chief of staff who went through a chaotic transition with Bill Clinton in 1992.

That transition and initial few months were so publicly and disastrously misleading and controversially more liberal than the public expected that they planted the seeds resulting two years later in Democrats losing control of both houses of Congress.

We wrote about Emanuel’s specific administration-rollout plans in this recent item. And you can see by the day as Obama, who vowed so often to be the agent of radical Capitol change, quickly scoots toward the political middle for his initial impressions with voters.

The Obama strategy allows the nation’s newly elected leader to appear to show careful movement to the public, even though he’s still 55 days away from the oath of office, while building a positive, crucial and actually premature first impression in these glowing days of his emotional public honeymoon.

‘Help,’ the president-to-be said today, ‘is on the way.’ That’s a direct quote of what his much-denounced Republican predecessor said throughout the autumn of 2000 after two terms of Democratic power with the same too-familiar faces and before Bush’s transition team filled the White House with Texans who’d promised to ‘change the tone in Washington.’

Maybe you noticed. That didn’t happen.

Obama also addressed head-on and slightly defensively the growing grumbles that his emerging team is a collection of Clinton or even Republican retreads. (Just wait until next week when the ‘new’ team members will include an actual Clinton.) You can see Obama’s response on the videos below.

We have two videos this afternoon -- first, brief coverage of the announcement of former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker as head of Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, and, second, click on the ‘Read more’ line to see the full video of the president-elect’s entire presentation in Chicago this morning.

You can’t hear the reporters’ questions. But it’s only a few minutes long and is worth a look for students of political smoothness who want to get an unfiltered impression of the new guy for themselves.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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