The Transition: What Change Will Look Like

With the election won, the Obama team faces the realities of governing. What the transition reveals about the kind of President Obama will be

Brooks Kraft / Corbis for TIME

In his first White House visit as President-elect, Obama walks with Bush down the famed colonnade outside the Oval Office.

It is one of the ironies of politics and history that when the candidate of change was pondering what he would do if he actually got elected President, he turned to the man who eight years before handed over the White House keys to George W. Bush. Former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta had met Barack Obama only a few times before the Democratic nominee summoned him to Chicago in August to ask him to begin planning a transition. Podesta supported Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries and had little in common with Obama beyond the...

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