KEY POINTS:
This afternoon Jean Smith will step into her Mercedes to begin what, for her, has become a familiar ritual during the course of eight presidential terms and transitions.
Smith, the doyenne of a small band of real estate agents who handle the buying and selling of homes in Washington's privileged white enclave of Georgetown, will show a multi-million-dollar house to a brand new client: a senior member of the presidential transition team, who plans to be settled in the nation's capital when Barack Obama finally becomes the 44th US President on January 20.
Smith's latest client has his work cut out. The Obama camp has already been deluged with more than 100,000 curriculum vitaes from enthusiastic Democrats, all hoping they will land one of the 3000 political appointments Obama is due to have made by the day he moves into the White House.
Incoming Democratic Administrations are not the most fruitful in Smith's line of business: "A lot of the political appointees can't afford Washington house prices in the first place. Even if they can, most of them don't want their constituents to know they've spent two or three million dollars on their house and send their kids to private schools. There really isn't the huge turnover you would think."
Most of the influx of newcomers, she said, head for the "McMansion" suburbs of Maryland and Virginia, to where Supreme Court judges and hundreds of politicians and their aides have flocked.
Head 5km past the White House and down Constitution Avenue, however, and you find a businessman who can hardly wait for Inauguration Day.
John Valanos is owner of the Monocle, the Washington restaurant closest to the Capitol, where countless political deals have been struck by politicians for nearly 50 years.
Contrary to most people's expectations, Democrats are good for business. "They tend to spend more per person [than Republicans], let's put it that way. Obama's election should make it a very good year for us when other industries are suffering. More people will be coming up to the Hill."
It seemed only yesterday, Valanos said, that Obama first came into the restaurant in 2005 as the newly elected senator from Illinois. "He worked the room like he was already running for higher office. He went to each table and either he would give them a nod or a handshake."
More good news for Valanos is that Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois congressman chosen as Obama's chief of staff, is also a Monocle regular. "He has periodic dinners for 20 or so fellow members of the House."
The transitions of the past two Democratic Presidents, Carter and Bill Clinton, were disastrously botched.
Seven of Carter's first eight appointees were cronies from Georgia rather than the artful operators with big-time government experience that every President needs. As a result, Carter never came close to acquiring the ability to negotiate his way around the corridors of power in Washington that were so unfamiliar to him.
Clinton was hopelessly lazy in making appointments and major posts were still vacant a year into his presidency. His appointees then needed to be vetted by the FBI and given security clearance before they could take office, thus creating an even more chaotic backlog. He also moved into the White House with the delusion shared by so many Presidents, that he could snap his fingers and make things happen.
The result was that Clinton had a rude awakening to the realities of the limits of presidential power early on, first when he tried to fulfil a campaign promise that gay people should be admitted to the military and then when he attempted to reorganise the White House travel office.
Even the President, he soon found, could be thwarted by generals supposedly under his command and by those artful Washington operators who seemed to be omnipresent.
Strategists inside Obama's team insist that he will not make the same mistakes, even though his first two appointments - those of Emanuel and David Axelrod, his very own Karl Rove, who masterminded Obama's political career and will be his senior adviser in the White House - are cronies from Chicago.
"There'll be a new Washington establishment to some degree, but it's certainly not going to be a renaissance of Camelot," said Richard Burt, chief US negotiator in the strategic arms reduction talks with the former USSR.
"I think [Obama's transition] is going to be very professional and buttoned-down. It might sound like an odd parallel, but I think it will be rather like [Ronald] Reagan's, very professionally organised and executed.
It's not going to be like the Clinton Administration, with pizza boxes strewn around everywhere and all-night gabfests."
For Obama, putting together his administration and filling those 3000 posts is not just a matter of choosing the best candidates. It is payback time for politicians who endorsed him (like John Kerry, who thinks he deserves to be made Secretary of State), for the 'bundlers' who raised hundreds of millions of dollars for his campaign, and companies and industries which also dispensed their largess.
The investment conglomerate of Goldman Sachs, for example, contributed more than US$740,000 ($1.25 million) to Obama's election coffers - but, like Citigroup (US$499,598), Morgan Stanley (US$344,130) and JPMorgan Chase (US$478,462), it expects something in return - as would Lehman Brothers (US$391,624), had it not gone under. Robert Rubin, the former head of Goldman Sachs, is currently Obama's chief economic adviser, though he has said that he does not want a senior post. But two Obama bundlers currently hold senior posts in the same company and may expect something. Citigroup's Michael Froman, yet another enthusiastic Obama bundler, has already been rewarded with a highly influential job in the transition team.
For many of the most senior members of the election campaign team, however, this is an agonising time. The hottest read in Washington this week will be the latest edition of the so-called "Plum Book", due to be published on Wednesday. It lists all the plum appointments Obama has at his disposal once all the Kerrys, Kennedys and Fromans (and hundreds like them) have been rewarded - from major cabinet posts down to minor ambassadorships.
The transition process is "excruciatingly painful" for less exalted (but often much more deserving) members of the campaign, a veteran of the Bush election team said.
"You've been really close to the candidate and working your fingers to the bone for him for months and never seeing your family, but then these folks from the transition team move in and take all the power. If they decide there's a government department they want to control, they'll pick somebody ineffectual to run it. Everybody's fighting with everybody, and you don't know from one day to the next whether you've got a job or not. It's a miserable experience."
- OBSERVER
