The best and the brightest

Barack Obama hasn't been sworn into office yet, but his incoming administration is already drawing comparisons to past presidents, as far back as Lincoln.

Like Obama, Abraham Lincoln was a member of Congress from Illinois before he was elected president during a time of crisis in the country. Lincoln famously surrounded himself with what Doris Kearns Goodwin has called a "team of rivals" by placing his political enemies into his cabinet.

Obama has been reading Lincoln and seems to be following in that mold. He has already appointed his former Democratic nomination rival, Joe Biden, to be his vice president, and he is reportedly planning to name two other rivals -- Hillary Clinton and Bill Richardson -- to his cabinet.

But the president-elect is also drawing comparisons with Franklin Roosevelt, who took over the country in 1933, after defeating an unpopular Republican who misread public response to economic crisis. Like John McCain's September 15 declaration that "the fundamentals of the economy are strong," Herbert Hoover made a similar gaffe, declaring shortly after the stock market crash that "the fundamental business of the country...is on a sound and prosperous basis."

And Obama is also being compared to the last young president who went directly from the Senate to the White House, John F. Kennedy, who brought together the "best and the brightest" people into his administration to advise him.

Kennedy brought in an all-star team of academics and intellectuals, according to author David Halberstam, whose 1972 book, The Best and the Brightest, critiqued the mistakes they made that led to the Vietnam War.

Obama is also putting together an all-star team of advisers to join his administration, but many of those who have been mentioned hail from the so-called "real world" instead of academia.

This morning in Chicago, Obama is expected to name New York Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner to be his Treasury Secretary and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers to head the National Economic Council.  As the former president of Harvard University, Summers is a part of the academic world, but as a former Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, he is also connected to the business world.

Other names mentioned as possible cabinet picks suggest the president-elect is trying to assemble his own crew of "the best and the brightest" to run the government. And perhaps that is a lesson drawn from a less likely comparison with George W. Bush.

Bush was criticized for several of his appointments, including Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary, Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court, Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General, and Michael Brown for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, whom critics believed were unqualified or incompetent. By picking the best and the brightest, Obama may be trying to avoid his predecessor's mistake.