AFTER a busy Thanksgiving holiday in Chicago, Barack Obama returns this week to the dramatic but potentially risky business of making presidential history. Never before has a president-elect proved so visible and voluble as he waits to enter the White House.

Fifty days before President George W Bush packs his bags for Texas, Obama has already usurped much of his predecessor’s authority. Yet in doing so he has exposed himself to early controversy that may seriously shorten the presidential honeymoon that most new incumbents enjoy. There are already stirrings of confusion and dismay among Democratic faithful perturbed by some of Obama’s early appointments.

At three press conferences last week, Obama in effect seized control of America’s economic policy, unveiling a new team of advisers and future cabinet members, and laying out his plans for a sweeping stimulus programme.

When India was rocked by terrorist attacks on Mumbai, it was to Obama that the American media turned for reaction. He consulted Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s secretary of state, and on Friday announced that he was closely monitoring the crisis even as his Chicago home was filling with 60 friends and family members invited for a Thanksgiving dinner.

Sounding every inch the man in charge, Obama declared: “These terrorists who targeted innocent civilians will not defeat India's great democracy, nor shake the will of a global coalition to defeat them.”

Where was Bush while all this was unfolding? He spent last weekend in Peru at a Pacific economic forum where he was photographed wearing a poncho; although the White House issued its own condemnation of the violence in India, Bush’s main presidential act last week was to “pardon” two Thanksgiving turkeys named Pumpkin and Pecan.

Obama will remain in the spotlight this week when he unveils his national security team, a strikingly bipartisan group that is expected to be led by Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, and Robert Gates, Bush’s defence secretary, who to the dismay of the Democratic antiwar lobby will remain at his post. Another non-Democrat, General James Jones, is expected to become national security adviser.

Despite Obama’s repeated insistence that “we only have one president at a time” and that Bush remains in charge, the speed with which he has moved to fill the vacuum created by a discredited Republican regime has stunned presidential scholars and awed a surprisingly compliant US media.

Apart from a few mocking remarks about Obama’s specially designed “office of the president-elect” logo and podium - a bogus concoction that has no basis in the US constitution - there has been little serious questioning of Obama’s unprecedented response to a deepening economic crisis and the continuing terrorist threat.

He has already given more press conferences as president-elect than any modern predecessor; Professor John Burke, an expert on presidential transition at the University of Vermont, described the Obama takeover as “more organised than any that we’ve seen”.

Peggy Noonan, a former Republican presidential speech-writer, noted last week that the first 100 days by which presidents are often judged were in effect already under way. “We don’t really have to wait until after the inauguration on January 20 for the new administration to begin,” she said.

Time magazine agreed that Obama “no longer has the luxury of waiting”. Austan Goolsbee, one of his senior economic advisers, noted: “We’re coming in with a bang.” Obama himself added: “With our economy in distress, we cannot hesitate and we cannot delay. We don’t intend to stumble into the next administration.”

While Obama’s bold moves have been broadly welcomed, they have also posed headaches for Democratic activists who have been surprised by the caution and moderation reflected in some of Obama’s cabinet picks. “It’s very hard for even leaders of the left to poke holes, because many of their followers will say ‘give the guy a break - 29he hasn’t even been in the White house yet’,” said Steven Clemons, a liberal analyst at the New America Foundation.

Clemons added: “We are in an Obama bubble now. And it’s tough to step out and be the first to deflate the bubble.” Trade union leaders who spent millions of dollars campaigning for Obama have nonetheless been shocked that nobody overtly sympathetic to the union movement has been appointed to the incoming economic team. Obama has not yet named a secretary of labour, which some activists interpreted as a worrying sign that bankers and employers have become higher priorities.

“If we believe this election was about rebuilding the middle class and reclaiming the American Dream, the next secretary of labour should be somebody who is passionate about workers,” warned Anna Burger, who as secretary-treasurer of a big services union was a key Obama supporter during the election campaign.

Obama’s eye-catching national security appointments have stunned many antiwar protesters who were convinced that Obama would stick to his pledges to close Guantanamo Bay and bring an early end to the war in Iraq.

The Nation, a liberal Washington weekly, complained that the candidates for Obama’s national security team had been “drawn exclusively from conservative, centrist and pro-military circles without even a single one chosen to represent the antiwar wing of the Democratic party”.

A coalition of liberal groups is planning to set up tents in January near Obama’s home in Hyde Park, Chicago, in the hope that their presence will “remind” the president-elect of his promises.

While many Democrats hope that Obama will reassure them once he gets into office, Jodie Evans, a well-known activist, told the Politico website last week that the president-elect was already “violating the people’s mandate”. Nor have Democrats been encouraged by Republican applause for the president-elect’s appointments. Max Boot, a foreign policy adviser to Senator John McCain, said last week he had previously been sceptical of Obama’s “moderate posturing”, but had been “gob-smacked” by an Obama team that was “stunning in its moderation”. Boot added: “Most of these appointments could just as easily have come from a President McCain.”

Joseph Lieberman, the conservative Democrat from Connecticut who infuriated his party colleagues by sharply criticising Obama and supporting McCain for president, last week apologised and declared that Obama’s actions had been “just about perfect”.

Most dispiriting of all for devotees of Obama’s mantra of “change” was a qualified thumbs up from Karl Rove, the Machiavellian mastermind behind Bush’s election victories. Rove declared that Obama’s economic team was “reassuring”, and that “he has generally surrounded himself with intelligent mainstream advisers”. One Democratic strategist noted, not entirely facetiously: “If Rove likes us, we must be in trouble.”

Obama seems assured of the benefit of the doubt at least until he publicly reneges on a central campaign promise. He insisted last week that he had not abandoned his commitment to change, and that his appointments were an appropriate response to the severity of the crises America is facing. “What we are going to do is combine experience with fresh thinking,” he said.

For now it doesn’t much matter that Clinton was vilified by liberal Democrats for supporting the war in Iraq or that Gates was first appointed by Bush.

Nor was anyone seriously concerned when it emerged last week that Obama had appointed a foreign policy expert named Samantha Power to his State Department transition team.

Power, a Pulitzer prize-winning historian from Harvard, is best known for having been forced to step down as an Obama adviser in March after describing Clinton as a “monster” who would “stoop to anything” to secure victory.

Power’s return will in effect make her a member of Clinton’s team should Hillary be named secretary of state. Such is Obama’s aura of infallibility, however, that the announcement of Power’s appointment two weeks ago went largely unremarked.

Video: Obama defends staffing choices

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