WASHINGTON (AFP) — Barack Obama still insists there can be only one president at a time, but with eight weeks to go before his January 20 inauguration, the Democrat looks like a man in charge.
Arguing there is not a "minute to waste," Obama this week moved with rare alacrity for a president-elect by naming his economic lieutenants and outlining an ambitious plan of spending to revive the economy.
Also unusual is the level of cooperation between Obama's team and the administration of President George W. Bush, who may be a lame duck but is still having to take momentous decisions to prop up Wall Street.
"We are working hand-in-glove with them," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Tuesday after the president informed Obama of his intent to bail out stricken financial services giant Citigroup.
Obama has pledged to honor Bush's far-reaching market interventions but at the same time, is issuing veiled criticisms of the outgoing president's piecemeal approach as he vows a coordinated plan of action for the economy.
On Tuesday, he said "I don't think that there's any question that we have a mandate to move the country in a new direction and not continue the same old practices that have gotten us into the fix that we're in."
Obama has invited comparisons to president Franklin D. Roosevelt, who took office in 1933 and refused overtures for a joint response to the gathering Great Depression from his lame-duck predecessor, Herbert Hoover.
But while Roosevelt was intent on arriving in the White House with a clean slate, Obama does not have that luxury in a 24-hour media age when fortunes are won and lost at the touch of a computer key.
"All this means that Obama has to act like a president before he is officially president, and that includes coordinating with Bush," Princeton presidential historian Julian Zelizer said.
He said it was "unusual" to have a president-elect taking command of the public agenda this early, and Obama's prominence was attributable to several factors.
"The first is we are in a major economic crisis, one that is part of global instability and one where there is potential for the crisis to grow in scale and scope with each day," the historian said.
"The second is that you have an incumbent president who is very weak politically and who faces a Democratic Congress. He has not moved very aggressively on the economy, and when he does there are limits to what he can do."
Obama touts a bipartisan consensus among liberal and conservative economists that his incoming administration will have to throw financial caution to the winds by spending what it takes to get the economy off life support.
If that means driving up the record-breaking deficit, then so be it, although the president-elect stressed Tuesday his ardor to drain the US budget of red ink when economic conditions allow.
In his economic team, Obama has assembled heavy-hitters who have a reputation as deficit hawks but who share his belief that old orthodoxies need rethinking to confront today's crisis.
Obama Monday nominated New York Federal Reserve chief Timothy Geithner to be his Treasury secretary, and named ex-Treasury secretary Larry Summers to be his chief White House economic adviser.
Crucially, both selections have been met with approval by the financial markets, as Obama takes the unusual step for a president-elect of naming his economic officials before his national security team.
"They are not visionaries but we don't need visionaries when the economic perils are clear and immediate," Robert Reich, who was labor secretary under Bill Clinton and who has advised Obama, wrote on his blog.
"We need competence. Obama could not appoint a more competent group," he said.
There are perils in Obama's course. He is the center of attention as the political oxygen sucks out of Bush, but he has no authority until January 20 and risks being saddled with unpopular policies from the outgoing president.
For Stephen Hess, a veteran White House aide who studies the presidency at the Brookings Institution, it is a risk that Obama has to take.
"He's giving us far more sense of what the policy will actually be than you would expect in a transition. He's gone beyond just priorities," he said. "Everything has had to be speeded up."
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