There'll be a crush of cameras at the front door of the White House on January 20 as scores of media outlets scramble to record the moment that the new president walks in. But, wait--who're those people who'll be sliding in quietly behind him? They're the ones who'll spend the next four years whispering in the president's ear, sitting in strategy sessions, running presidential councils, filling agency slots, and pulling the levers of executive power. They'll make up "The Administration," and they'll affect everything from economic policies to war, so it's worth getting a sense of them in advance of the election.
For a clue as to what kinds of people either McCain or Obama would carry into office, look at the top campaign advisors, fund raisers, and staffers already around them, for they're likely to move right along with their man. These people both reflect and shape a president's agenda, sometimes wielding the influence to alter both the overall direction and specific substance of a presidency.
Take the corporatization of Bill Clinton's administration. He had run a populist-minded campaign in 1992, pledging to challenge corporate greed and promising to be the president of working families. Come '93, however, such corporate hands as Robert Rubin were awarded strategic positions. A prince of Wall Street who'd been one the campaign's top fund raisers, Rubin was ensconced as head of Clinton's economic council--and he served there as corporate America's inside hit man, responsible for taking populist proposals down into a dark basement and throttling them.
In his first State of the Union speech, for example, Clinton proposed that tax write-offs for a corporate CEO's bloated paycheck be limited to "only" the first million bucks. The very next night, CEOs of several major corporations swarmed Rubin at a Manhattan dinner, wailing about Clinton's "cheap populism." Rubin, who'd been a $26-million man at Goldman Sachs, definitely felt their pain, and he smoothed their ruffled feathers with these words: "That's not the real Bill Clinton."
Apparently not. With Rubin counseling that it wasn't good to make CEOs jittery, Clinton immediately dropped the idea. He never brought it up again.
"Tell me with whom you walk," goes the old adage, "and I'll tell you who you are." Who is walking with McCain and Obama? While it's fun to speculate about who might be the vice-president choices of this year's candidates (and you can join the fun on page 3), it's more instructive to rummage through the names on the campaign teams to see who might go inside with the winner. This month we'll give you a tour of Obama's brain trust, and in the August issue we'll look into the McCain campaign.
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What the hell's happening here? Why is my bank in the tank? And my house and job? And my retirement money? Even my state's teetering on the brink of broke! Who did this to us? Fair questions, but we're not getting honest answers. 
