Everyone is asking the Ed Koch question: how is Obama doing so far? The answer is that he is doing very well, thank you, though that should be qualified by saying that he hasn’t done much so far other than organize his administration. His first legislative accomplishment will be in the next few weeks, if it comes, and if the stimulus package is not approved or is significantly altered, then he will not have been doing well at all. What has been run out so far is far different from the first week after FDR was inaugurated, when a variety of legislative accomplishments showed the new administration was starting fast. So far, this administration has shown that it is proceeding intelligently and prudently. That, of course, puts it way above the last administration or the one before that, Clinton having been bogged down in contentious appointments and side issues. In fact, we would have to look back to Reagan to find an administration that landed on its feet, however wrong was the direction in which it walked.

The media have accepted, so far, that Obama’s policy announcements make the headlines but leave the specifics to the future. There was the promise to close Guantanamo, though it might take a year to accomplish that goal because decisions have to be made as to what to do with the detainees. If you think about it, “detainees” is a funny term, drawing short of describing those prisoners as either prisoners of war or as criminals. Somehow, the administration has to come up with a procedure that allows persons now held who are what used to be considered prisoners of war—enemy combatants caught on the battlefield—to be held indefinitely even if they have engaged in no crime other than being on the other side of a war and so had tried to or cooperated with those who tried to kill our soldiers or damage our infrastructure. That is a very dicey issue for the public, which does not want to grant the terrorists the rights that modern warriors are supposed to have. There is also the question of whether there will be any exceptions to the rule that the United States will no longer engage in torture. I think that here the press is just being a little too suspicious, even if it does have good reason to be suspicious of the distance between government announcements and government practice. It was, nonetheless, quite something to hear the Director of National Intelligence as well as the Attorney General designate say without equivocation that water-boarding is torture and that there would be no torture on their watch. Still, so far, just promises.

The appointment of George Mitchell as Middle East envoy and Richard Holbrooke as envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan were not accomplishments either, only a promise that able people would be in charge in each of those areas. They were, though, part of something much more important: a radical change in the way in which the Executive Branch is organized. The President’s Cabinet has for a long time now met in whole on only symbolic occasions. It is too cumbersome to act as an advisory body and many cabinet officers are in no position to offer advice on matters not within their own jurisdiction. What Obama has done is complete the transition to White House dominance over the Cabinet that was begun by making the National Security Advisor such an important person that he or she spent more time with the President than the Secretary of State, and was supposed to coordinate the activities of the Defense Department, the Intelligence Community and the State Department—not that Condi was ever up to that task.

What Obama has done is install three or more super Cabinet advisors in the White House, each one of them charged with coordinating the activities of a number of Cabinet Departments. Jim Jones, the National Security Advisor, does that for State, Defense, Homeland Security and the Intelligence Community. Larry Summers does that for Treasury, the Federal Reserve Bank (not so long ago, under Greenspan, thought to be an independent actor that reported to no one), Commerce, Labor, and other economic agencies. It was Summers who sent a letter to Congress concerning how TARP funds would be subject to much more oversight than was the case in the prior administration—which meant the week before. I know Tim Geithner had not yet been approved as Secretary of the Treasury, but Summers is the President’s point man on the economy anyway. (It is interesting that Obama insisted on pushing Geithner through, and so avoided the problem Clinton had of having to pull the names of his first two nominees for Attorney General.)

Carolyn Browner is performing the same job of overseeing from the White House the Cabinet Departments and the other agencies that have something to do with climate and the environment. How the Department of Energy will fit into the model is undoubtedly an evolving issue. Its responsibilities could go into the security, environment or economic portfolios. And whether Tom Daschle, once Majority Leader of the United States Senate, is health and welfare chief and not just Secretary of Health and Human Services is yet to be seen, since Melody Barnes, the head of the Domestic Affairs Council and so the person in the White House managing social policy, does not seem, despite her many years as an aide to Senator Kennedy, to be as heavy a hitter as Daschle.

Whatever, what Obama has done is not only make everybody report to somebody but also added or filled out another layer of government, and there has been mightily little talk about this, perhaps because Obama has not chosen to make a point of it. Anyway, what this means is that Holbrooke and Mitchell report to Hillary who reports to Obama through Jones. Obama said as much when he said Mitchell speaks for “us”, which means the foreign policy team rather than for one of its constituent parts. No cabinet official is a lone ranger; the Secretary of State, unlike John Foster Dulles, can’t change the foreign policy of the United States while shaving—well, that was the way it was put in the old days. FDR is a tough act to follow in that he was creative in doing away with neat organizational charts and creating new agencies until he found ones that worked.

Obama seems to have been advised on the need for multiple sources of information as well as the active coordination of that information. JFK understood the first point from the beginning of his Administration. He consulted Richard Neustadt, the leading light at the time on the organization of the executive, and Neustadt, who had just told JFK to consult numerous people, reports himself to have been very pleased to hear from JFK that the to be President was also consulting people other than Neustadt on how to organize the executive branch. It took a little longer for JFK to get the other part of the formula right. It was only after the Bay of Pigs that he instructed Sorenson to keep an eye out for what was going on in military matters, and that paid off, at least in terms of process, when the crisis over Soviet missiles in Cuba arose

The event yet to be seen is a major legislative accomplishment. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. documents how FDR saw Congress pass, by the end of his first week in office, an Emergency Banking Bill that allowed the Federal Reserve to issue money. That helped make the banks seem more trustworthy when they reopened; it also allowed government securities to get sold right away. Congress also passed an economic bill that cut government spending and a bill to repeal Prohibition. And FDR, during that time, was able to offer the first of his Fireside Chats. It was a busy week that Obama did not try to emulate. Obama knew that the Congress is not now in a state of panic, which it was in 1933. Some might credit the approval of the second half of TARP to pre-inauguration Obama pressure, and treat that as an accomplishment. He threatened to veto the bill if it didn’t authorize the funding. Making it hard to keep the money from the Executive, though, was part of the last Congress’s activities, not this one’s. Obama’s first real effort is to get his stimulus package through. He knows that Congress will take his measure by whether he succeeds or fails at that.

Notice how different this stimulus bill is from a previous legislative initiative by an incoming President. Jimmy Carter was famously turned down very early in his term when all he wanted was for Congress to eliminate a few pork projects. It would have allowed him to show himself as a clean government type. It did not mean pork was banned forever, just for a few weeks. But Congress would not give him the satisfaction. Carter did not realize that pork was the core of what Congress did and does. Obama is reversing the formula. His stimulus package has loads of pork. It is a Christmas tree list of special projects that are tagged either as investments or as ways to create jobs. Congress will therefore be very reluctant to turn it down because it contains something for just about all the constituencies.

Sure, the Republicans claim it will cost too much, but that is just the time honored rhetoric they use, not what they act on. And Obama has given them enough in the way of tax cuts to satisfy their ideological inclinations and the constituencies they think they represent. The Republican minority leader in the House, John Boehner, has tipped his hand. He sounds a bit aggrieved but hardly up in arms when he says the bill spends too much on useless things like contraceptives, even though it is usually the conservatives who are the ones who are out to decrease the population of the poor so as to save money in future welfare payments and other government expenses aimed at satisfying the needs of the poor. Boehner said over this past weekend that he will vote against the bill and added that other Republicans would join him on behalf of principle, which means that he is not making this vote a party line issue; he is allowing a large number of his caucus to support the bill so that they can run two years from now on what the pork barrel in the bill did for their districts.

In sum, Obama has been, so far, very crafty and very well organized and very prudent. The question is whether he can deliver something, anything, abroad, and whether the economy will show in the next two years the effects of his ministrations in the form of new electrical grid projects, more solar and wind power, more child health clinics, and other intermediate measures of success, and possibly even a bottoming out of the unemployment rate. The thing, though, is that FDR was successful fast and we don't know whether Obama will be stalled by spring. It is no sure thing that he won’t be. We shall see.