Power Switch, Interactive: The New D.C.

[DeepModem Mom]

Financial Times: Power switch
By Our Washington Staff
January 19 2009

A new occupant in the White House is always a harbinger of change in Washington, this election made all the more visible with a 47-year-old African-American from Chicago taking over from a 62-year-old white Texan. Barack Obama’s team reflects the change too. They are younger, more diverse, more tech savvy and geographically distinct from those they replace.

Our interactive graphic profiles the new players in Washington and shows their connections – whether through Capitol Hill, Chicago, University, or the Clinton administration.

(NOTE: Check out the interactive graphic at the link.)

But it’s not just the faces that are changing at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The Obama-led White House may be more crowded: So much time are staffers expected to be spending at the White House that Obama officials are already exploring ways in which their families can regularly visit them.

Grassroots campaign rhetoric aside, Mr Obama is likely to take a top down approach to implementing a more grueling schedule for his team. Mr Bush was usually in bed by 10pm and only rarely accepted invitations to dinner outside of the White House, but Mr Obama is a regular night bird. His staff will have to get used to a diet of evening meetings as well as the usual murderously early morning start. And Sunday may turn into a working day as well. Unlike Mr Bush, who had six weekly intelligence briefings a week, Mr Obama has been receiving seven.

More broadly, Washington’s power will switch from conservative to liberal and become younger. Many of the incoming 3,300 presidential appointees will be in their twenties or thirties and hail from Ivy League universities.

And unlike the Bush crowd’s Southern tilt, many of Obama’s team will be from America’s derided ‘elite’ East or West coasts. The same may apply to the hundreds of students or young postgraduates filling the much-coveted internships across the administration. Under Mr Bush, many interns were fervent Christians from Regent University and Liberty University in Virginia, in spite of those institutions’ relatively less than top-flight academic reputations....

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a23bf7b4-e65f-11dd-8e4f-0000779fd2ac.html