After longest day Obama keen to marshal his forces in victory

IT IS only backstage, as Team Obama hunkers down on the sofa to wait for victory to be declared, that you get a glimpse of the nerves etched deep into exhausted faces.

As the first black First Family waits to be shown into the White House, there's no rest for the aides seen scurrying about in photographs released yesterday by his campaign team.

Supporters are only too well aware of concerns among Americans that an economy teetering on a knife-edge will not afford the president-elect the traditional limbo period between election day and his January inauguration.

For his election campaign, Barack Obama sidestepped the left-right divide by casting himself as the saviour of a nation crippled by the corruption of the body politic.

Sources in Washington are already saying he is hungry to maintain the momentum: he won't want to wait until he is formally sworn in on 20 January to start confirmation hearings – vetting procedures in front of the Senate – on his top team.

This is a man who was swept to power on a promise of change and now he has to convince people he can hit the ground running before taking over the reins in 73 days from George Bush, the outgoing president.

"Senators are preparing themselves to confirm some of the nominees so people are ready to go on 20 January," one source has told The Scotsman.

The appointment, confirmed yesterday, of Illinois congressman Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff underlines Mr Obama's desire for a hard-hitter to get things moving sooner rather than later.

"You don't ever want a crisis to go to waste; it's an opportunity to do important things," said Mr Emanuel.

Even before his first trip to the White House on Monday, Mr Obama has set about convening the first meeting of economic advisors to kickstart his policy making.

"Six weeks ago, our economy teetered on the precipice of collapse," said Chris Dodd, a Democrat and chairman of the Senate's committe on banking. "The new administration will have no more urgent priority in my view than putting a team of capable, experienced and qualified economic leaders swiftly in place."

The top priority for Mr Obama is the desire to get immediate ownership of the government's $700 billion banking bail-out plan, forestalling the Bush administration's version which Democrats say is too kind to banks.

"In these very difficult economic conditions, doing nothing is not an option," said the independent Vermont senator Bernie Sanders.

Mr Obama has shown that he intends to be his own boss by refusing to attend Mr Bush's 15 November global economic summit, a sign that he, backed by a Democratic-controlled Congress, wants to be in charge from now on.

Urgency is also evident in foreign policy: Mr Obama wants a top team at the table to intercept any attempt by the Bush administration to agree a Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government that does not fit his promise of early troop withdrawal.

Helping him in early transition is the ramshackle nature of the discredited Bush administration.

The State Department is these days almost on autopilot, its officials having apparently made a private decision to turn their back on the NeoCon dream of an isolationist United States, and discussions will start next week with Mr Obama's new Secretary of State, effectively bypassing the current office-holder, Condoleezza Rice.

The other big test is healthcare: Americans pay, via private insurance, approximately twice what Europeans pay through taxes for a similar standard of health care. During his campaign, the president-elect railed against pharmaceutical companies for "drugs that cost twice as much here as they do in Europe and Canada".

But waving the magic wand of change is not that simple.

"The days of Big Pharma's dominance over Washington may be coming to an end," said a healthcare expert, Mike Adams. "But let's also remember that Big Pharma is all of a sudden funnelling tens of millions of dollars into the pockets of Democrats, and there's one simple truth about Washington that transcends all political parties: money buys influence."

Mr Obama lacks the mandate, and maybe the inclination, to simply nationalise the hospitals, as Britain's postwar Labour government did.

Instead, he will offer what amounts to a government-run insurance system – which, as it need not make a profit, would theoretically undercut the premiums offered by insurance companies.

That's fine in theory, but he can expect furious resistance from the health care industry, particularly if the price means tens of thousands of insurance company workers losing their jobs.

"He has put forward some good ideas," says Dan Smith, president of the American Cancer Society. "Obviously the devil is in the details."

Mr Bush, by contrast, cuts almost a forlorn figure these days. The US media has labelled him the "invisible president" after his decision to cut out almost all public appearances in recent days, leaving him dubbed "forgotten, but not gone".

So toxic was he seen to his own party that Mr Bush dodged a televised appearance at a voting booth last week, becoming the first US president for decades to vote by absentee ballot.

Now he cuts a vivid contrast to the frenetic Mr Obama, spending his final days whiling away his time, with few visitors, in the wintry landscape of the Camp David presidential retreat in the Catoctin mountains.

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