Setting to work on promised changes

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — At the end of his first day as president, after the ceremony and speech, the parade and all the balls, Barack Obama found himself home in the White House and unsure exactly where to go. “It’s a pretty big house,” an aide said.

A pretty big job, too, he might have added.

Days into his presidency, Obama is starting to find his way around the halls not only of his house but also of power, making the transition from campaigning to governing and taking his first steps to mold the office into what he wants it to be.

From his transition to the tone of his inaugural address to his first orders and meetings, Obama signaled that he wants to change the country’s course as he promised in his campaign, but that he’ll move cautiously at times, work to build consensus rather than adopt a my-way-or-the-highway style and reach out to the right, not only symbolically but also substantively.

“Their focus is on sending an image of efficiency and centrism, and an attempt to move from the soaring rhetoric of the campaign to the nuts and bolts of governing,” said Dennis Goldford, a political scientist at Drake University in Iowa.

Obama set the tone with an inaugural address that was sober about the challenges facing the country as well as uplifting about the nation’s prospects.

He also used the speech to suggest sharp breaks from the Bush years: a turn away from a laissez-faire approach to the marketplace, a return to greater cooperation with allies, an opening to rogue nations. He also opened the door wide to a post-partisan way of doing business in Washington.

Some of his first actions underscored a cautious approach that’s natural for the law school professor in him.

With a flourish, for example, he signed an executive order to close the detention facility for suspected terrorists at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Yet he gave the Pentagon a year to figure out what to do with the people detained there, including deciding how or whether to try them in civilian or military courts.

“I was struck by the caution implicit in what he said about Guantanamo, that he expressed a certain amount of surprise at just how dangerous these people are and that this won’t be the easiest thing,” said Michael Franc, the vice president for government relations at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research center.

“He’s making the transition from being a candidate to being a leader. Sometimes when you start getting the intelligence briefings, it changes the way you look at the world.”