CEO in chief

    That same day he made another move toward the middle when he announced that economist Jason Furman would be running his economic policy shop. The Harvard-trained Furman ruffled the labor crowd because he had written an academic defense of Wal-Mart (WMT, Fortune 500), arguing that its low prices helped struggling workers. Just 38 years old when tapped by Obama, Furman began to adeptly manage the candidate's growing stable of economic experts.

    "These are good friends of mine," he told Fortune. Those friends and colleagues included the Clinton advisors who came flooding into the campaign after the former First Lady bowed out of the race - Robert Reich and Lawrence Summers, and former White House advisors Laura Tyson and Gene Sperling, among them.

    By the end of July, Obama had convened a summit on the impending financial crisis that also included Robert Rubin, former Bush Treasury chief Paul O'Neill, J.P. Morgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500) CEO Jamie Dimon, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, as well as top union leaders.

    By August, Obama was phoning Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson for personal briefings on the Bush administration's reaction to the market turmoil. It was this advisor heft, more than anything, that enabled candidate Obama to establish his credentials as a potential President when the markets went into a spine-chilling tailspin, while McCain - relying on his instincts more than on outside expertise - shifted directions in a pattern that his opponent quickly tagged as "erratic."

    Americans like to put governors in the White House - Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush. Unlike U.S. Senators, governors have experience running large, complex organizations. The only major organization Obama has ever run is his own campaign.

    By all accounts it was an impressive enterprise - consistent yet innovative, disciplined yet nimble, and strung together with one overriding rule: No jerks allowed. With egos expected to be checked at the door, there was little of the dissension and drama that typically dog presidential campaigns. Senior aides who helped the candidate craft all those policy proposals he campaigned on say he likes to hear from a range of experts before reaching a decision.

    "He really questions his advisors aggressively," says Harvard's Liebman. "He wants to see disagreements aired in front of him. He likes to have the actual experts in the room."

    Obama told Fortune last June, "I don't like ideology overriding fact. I like facts, then determining what we need to do. I believe in a strong feedback loop. Companies that are successful do that." Obama has said the one book, besides the Bible, that would be a staple of his White House is Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals. The book chronicles President Lincoln's decision to include political opponents on his White House team, the better to keep his enemies close and eavesdrop on the sound of dissenting voices.

    On one point, however, there is growing consensus: that the Obama administration should pursue more spending in Washington to jump-start the economy.

    The major split between advisors during the Clinton administration - big government spenders like Reich vs. deficit hawks like Rubin - is unlikely to return. William Galston, a key centrist warrior during the Clinton years, says the party has moved to the left - embracing a more activist federal government - because the facts on the ground have changed.

    People need relief from real economic anxiety; healthcare costs are hurting businesses as well as consumers; events like the collapse of levees in New Orleans and the highway bridge in Minnesota suggest a national infrastructure that has suffered from a lack of tending. "There has been an orgy of private consumption but a deficit of public investment," Galston says.

    In this, the spending advocates have some support from prominent economists. "The rescue packages are not a big deal from the point of view of the budget deficit," says Alice Rivlin, the first director of the Congressional Budget Office. "They shouldn't be thought of as straight expenditure; they should be thought of as a federal loan, in which [taxpayers] will get something back over time."

    When Barack Obama was first sworn in as a U.S. Senator - less than four years ago - he ranked 99th in seniority. "I was proud that I wasn't ranked dead last until I found out that it's just because Illinois is bigger than Colorado," he quipped in a 2005 commencement address.

    After taking the oath of office, he held a press briefing in his tiny transition office in the basement of the Dirksen Senate Office Building. As Obama notes in the telling of this story, he hadn't cast a single vote or even sat at his own desk. Still, a reporter raised his hand and asked: "Senator Obama, what is your place in history?"

    It was an absurd question at the time, though certainly not now, as the President-elect prepares to take hold of the world's largest economy at this perilous moment. Obama's advisors say the unfolding of the 2008 financial crisis has only made the Illinois Senator more eager to take the reins of government. "You don't get to implement major changes in American economic policy absent something going pretty wrong," Bernstein notes. "He has a historical opportunity to step into the breach."

    Even before the markets collapsed, Obama was fond of citing transformative moments in his speeches: Reconstruction, the Great Depression, World War II dangerous times when the nation's leaders were forced into action. This fall, as the economy tumbled, Republican leaders were forced into action. Now it's Obama's turn.

    "I like the heat," Obama told me when we spoke on a humid North Carolina afternoon. It was 101 degrees on that day. And now he's in the kitchen.