NJ: Ron Brownstein is the political director of Atlantic Media, including the National Journal. Ron, welcome.

Brownstein: Hi, Tammy.

NJ: Thank you for that interview with Dr. Brzezinski. I want to talk to you about politics and what is going on right now with Obama. We see their team, we see the economic team, we've seen the foreign policy team, let's talk about the politics. How are they doing? Where do they need to go in the next week?

Brownstein: Well, certainly he's put together a team of prominent people. He's bringing a lot of throw weight into this administration, and the obvious question will be how will all of these personalities mesh. Another aspect of it that I think is striking -- and we talked about this a little bit before -- is how many of these people are not longtime confidantes of his. He's expressing a lot of confidence that he can knit together a government of disparate views who don't know him that well in many cases and don't know each other that well in many cases. Especially on the foreign policy side, where you have key players -- a Jim Jones, Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates -- none of whom were by any means part of his inner circle during the general election and, of course, ran against Clinton in the primary. So, there's a lot of pressure on Obama himself, an expression of confidence -- we'll see if it's borne out -- that he is the one who can really make all of this mesh. Now in terms of the politics, he is challenging his Democratic coalition with many of these appointments. The most liberal choice, by and large, on every one of these major decisions was passed over. It could have been Joseph Stiglitz instead of Larry Summers for the chief economic adviser in terms of real economic heavyweights probably preferred by the left; Jon Corzine would have been preferred by the left over Timothy Geithner; the list of people that would have been preferred by the left over Jim Jones and Robert Gates is probably almost infinite. So he has pushed his coalition quite a bit here, and we'll see whether he now tries to balance in some of the second-tier appointments with folks who may be more conventionally acceptable to the left.

NJ: But what worries me when you tell me this is we've got an economic crisis of unknowing proportions even at today, with these incredible job loss numbers, and we've got all these foreign policy issues, but the way you're talking about it is by having all these disparate parts together, he's the center of it. So is he going to have to spend all his time managing all these people? Isn't it harder to lead when you have to sit there in a meeting every day with your Cabinet or all your various advisers, or does he just, you know, tell them, "you do this, you do that"?

Brownstein: Well, that will be the challenge. The challenge will be if the pieces don't mesh as he's hoping; I think it will require enormous intervention by him to keep the whole thing moving forward. The opportunity is that he's brought in, as we said, a lot of throw weight here. He has brought in heavyweights on both the domestic and foreign policy team. I think very clearly they have indicated that one of the reasons why he has gone for people who are seasoned and experienced, even if they were not part of his long march toward the nomination, is he felt that in this extraordinary circumstance that he's inheriting, he needs people who are ready to operate on day one. And certainly no one would say that Tim Geithner at Treasury, or Jim Jones as the national security adviser, or Robert Gates at Defense are going to need on-the-job training. These are people who've been in the middle of the challenges that they will face. That is the upside. The downside will be if, in fact, they do not work together as well as he's hoping, it's going to put a lot of pressure on him and Rahm Emanuel as the chief of staff to kind of pull all of this together.

NJ: I have run into Dana Perino, Tony Fratto, a couple of White House folks, Ed Gillespie, who have spent an enormous amount of time working with the Obama folks to make sure that this transition is completely smooth. How unusual is that?

Brownstein: I think the degree of coordination here is unusual and reflects well on the outgoing Bush team and the incoming Obama team. And it's another reflection, like the seniority of these appointments, of the extraordinary circumstances, particularly on the economic side, that he is inheriting. Everyone understands there's very little margin for error here. I mean, extraordinary decisions that will have to be taken in the next few weeks on what to do about the auto companies -- GM, General Motors, the symbol of American industrial might in the 20th century, teetering possibly on bankruptcy -- and, you know, a very complex situation in which you have an outgoing administration that still has enormous say, a Congress that isn't certain what to do, and a president-elect in the wings who has indicated he wants to see some action, but of course does not have a lever to pull at this moment. He can advise, but he can't command.

NJ: So there's no margin for error on policy side, there's no margin for error with Congress, right?

Brownstein: Well, you know, I think the congressional relationship with Obama, we're going to have to see how that sorts out. We can all remember, at least some of us can remember, Bill Clinton came into office in 1993 with margins in the House and the Senate roughly comparable to what Barack Obama will receive. So there was unified Democratic control, big margins of majority, and it didn't work. On many issues, the party simply would not come together -- the left and the right wings of the Democratic Party would not sacrifice their individual views to try to reach a kind of consensus that allowed the party to move forward -- and we saw failures ranging from health care, which was largely derailed by conservatives, to the crime bill, which was derailed by liberals and conservatives, to NAFTA, which was resisted by a majority of Democrats in the House. I think it is an open question whether Democrats are going to behave differently this time. There's a lot of reasons to think they will move together more effectively than they did under Clinton. For one thing, they saw the consequence of that failure under Clinton, which of course was losing control of the House and Senate in 1994. They've also had the example of a Republican majority that was much more disciplined, was much more capable of forcing compromise on both the left and the right of its coalition: conservatives accepting the Medicare prescription drug bill in 2003; more moderate Republicans accepting the tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. So there's an opportunity for Obama here to have a better performance, a more unified performance, than we saw under Democrats in '93 and '94. But like everything else, that is not guaranteed, and as Dr. Brzezinski said, the key here is in the performance on an awful lot of these questions, and certainly on whether [Nancy] Pelosi and [Harry] Reid and the Democratic caucus are willing to move in a more unified direction with a more -- kind of more in harness than they were under Bill Clinton is going to be one of the critical factors to see how Obama gets out of the blocks.

NJ: Now I read that the Obama folks plan to do more town meetings in December. Is this part of their campaign to keep him in the public eye without making policy decisions? What can you give us on that?

Brownstein: You know, I think it's partially that, but it's also perhaps more importantly another step toward how they intend to use and apply this vast grassroots network they have built to governing. In the campaign they had 4 million donors, 2 million volunteers, somewhere between 10 and 13 million people on their e-mail list. And that is a tangible asset in terms of a network of supporters that really no president has had in quite so physical and easily attacked way. He gave a speech during the campaign, which received very little attention, in which he talked about using technology to try to connect voters to government and citizens to government more effectively. He talked about requiring his Cabinet officers to hold online town meetings. I interviewed him after that speech and I said, "Well, do you really want the secretary of State or the secretary of Defense spending time holding online town meetings?" and he said, "Absolutely." So trying to use technology as a way of breaking down the barrier and also communicating directly to his electorate without having to go through the filter of the national media is, I think, something that is important to him. They haven't figured out how they want to do all of this, but the town meetings you're talking about are the kinds of things that Tom Daschle has been doing about health care, which was reported in the Washington Post this week, are early experiments in trying to figure out whether -- because I think it is an open question -- whether they can make this asset useful to them in governance.

NJ: I talked to Robert Gibbs last night about the videos online -- because it's the best thing that ever happened to my business for them to be in all video -- and I said, a couple of people shall remain nameless, look scared to death. I said we call that "hostage video" in television, and he said, "Well, I've had to kill a few videos," so we'll see what they're doing. Ron Brownstein, thank you for being with us.

Brownstein: Thank you, Tammy.

CORRECTION: The original version of this transcript misspelled Joseph Stiglitz's name.

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