Obama readies his team
Months before Tuesday's election, Barack Obama was already secretly planning for taking on the nation's top job, transitioning his political campaign into a governing machine.
The new president-elect has a transition of just 77 days from his election to his inauguration to slow the ship of state, replace thousands of government officials and chart a new course.
Since the first transition, in 1797, from president George Washington to John Adams, the peaceful handover of power has become ever more choreographed with each successive administration, especially since World War II.
But the 2009 cycle, from President George W. Bush to his successor will be more fraught than usual, with the United States mired in a financial crisis and with more than 150,000 soliders in combat abroad.
"You have to go back to 1933 to find a transition as equally challenging as this one," said Darrell West, director of Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, citing the transfer of power to Franklin D. Roosevelt during a banking crisis.
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