By November 3, the forty-third U.S. president had all but vanished. He had only a handful of public events scheduled for the final weeks of October and none for the first few days of November. Bush's 20 percent approval rating, the lowest on record for any president, stood as a testimony to the country's rejection of his prideful, intensely personal style of leadership. During the decades since Nixon, Republican politicians had found success in a particular model: stalwart, unreflective leadership that championed America's greatness at every turn and conceded nothing to their opponents. But Republican presidents had a tendency to turn away from party dogma by the end of their tenures. The term "Nixon to China"-referring most literally to the direct talks Nixon held with a Chinese leadership he had long reviled-is now a catchphrase for how a leader can move in an unexpected direction. Reagan, who won the presidency advocating tax cuts, saw in his second term that he had gone too far and reined in those cuts. Then he sat down rather amicably with Gorbachev, head of the "evil empire," to work on ridding the world of nuclear weapons. Even Bush the Elder went back on his "No new taxes" pledge in an effort to balance the budget-a decision that helped set the table for Clinton's budgetary success.

But Bush the Younger never made a similar leap. He watched the election approach from inside the White House, a pariah now across the land he had governed with will and nerve. He remained forthright, unwilling to apologize for anything that might have gone wrong during his eight years, uninterested in second-guessing himself. No, he was going into hiding, not planning to emerge from the White House. He voted by absentee ballot. The leader of the free world, head of the world's longest-standing democracy, would be staying home on Election Day. He had already mailed it in.

Eras end with a whisper, reflection, and the quiet drift preceding sleep.

But they start with a roar, the forceful declaration of a new dawn, different from all those that came before.

A wave was gathering force across the country on the night before the election. It had been gathering for weeks. The gra.s.s roots that had taken hold in Iowa a year before had steadily spread, gaining purchase from state to state, and by November 3, 2008, Team Obama was running through fields of tall gra.s.s, in city after city, town after town.

The senator would give the final speech of his campaign that night in Mana.s.sas, Virginia, and everything was clicking for him. David Axelrod, his campaign manager, worried now about the fact that he could not think of anything to worry about.

"I don't have much time to reflect on what's happening-to ask the why questions-and Barack doesn't, either," Axelrod said. But as he paced the carpet, he was reminded of the original why question that had gotten all this started.

It had come in December 2006. Obama, Mich.e.l.le, and eight others were gathered in Axelrod's downtown Chicago office. If Obama was going to run, he had to decide soon. The group had laid out what the primary schedule would look like, alongside a thorough game plan for fund-raising and organization building. Insights and queries shot back and forth across the room.

But it was Mich.e.l.le, Axelrod remembered, who stopped the show.

"You need to ask yourself why you want to do this," she said. "What are you hoping to uniquely accomplish, Barack?" Obama sat quietly for a moment, while everyone waited to hear what he would say.

"This I know," Obama said. "When I raise my hand and take that oath of office, I think the world will look at us differently. And millions of kids across the country will look at themselves differently."

Obama understood, from his own search for ident.i.ty, how America's struggle with race was part of a larger story-a quest for dignity and hope that defined countless lives across the globe. This battered and downcast nation, he believed, was ready-eager, even-to prove the truth of its sacred oaths and, in so doing, prove itself once again to the broader world: liberty and justice for all. If through his own ambitions he could offer the country a chance to step forward, the country just might rise to the occasion and step with him into a brighter future.

And it had. You could see it clearly, at this highest peak of the journey, the last night of a historic twenty-one-month campaign. By 10:00 p.m., a hundred thousand people had gathered at the Prince William County Fairgrounds in Mana.s.sas. They had been gathering since midafternoon, matching, person for person, the largest crowd Obama had ever drawn.

Mana.s.sas lay on one of those border territories where the two Americas met, where the edge of D.C.'s suburbs bled into the real Old Dominion, where Starbucks gave way to gun shops, whole grains to grits. Under a dark and starless sky, people arrived from every direction, trekking miles on foot from the nearest parking spots, through a cool, misty bite of the November air. The crowds pressed thick along the fences, Americans of all backgrounds and skin colors huddling close. A special-ed teacher and her sister, who said, "I never felt this way. I just feel like he can save us," stood beside an American-born Rothschild, a big contributor who had met Obama at a fund-raiser and said she'd "never been the same." Down the row, a Virginian farmer, thick-necked, calloused, and brush-scrubbed after a day with his hogs, remarked that it was "a long way from the War of Northern Aggression, which my great-greats fought in, to here." But not so far. It was only about five miles from the battlefield where northern and southern troops first clashed in the battle of Bull Run to start the Civil War. One hundred and forty-seven years later, at 10:28 p.m., a black man stepped to the stage, the presidency within his grasp.

"What a scene, what a crowd," Obama said, half to himself, half to the roiling sea of humanity screaming in jubilation and waving American flags. He shook his head. "Wow."

The crowd seemed to swell with recognition. This is the way great speeches work: the call and the response. The giver receives, the receivers give, and they are one. With long-deferred dreams waiting in the wings, tonight, for the last time, the crowd could watch their hero reach, fingertips outstretched, for the great prize, and say, like a silent hymn, So close, so close, and when you reach it, we will reach it, too.

America believes it is a blessed nation, that its triumphs and misfortunes bear the imprint of higher purpose. Everyone in the crowd knew the heartrending final twist of the story, that Obama's grandmother-the tough Kansan lady who worked in a bomber factory through World War II and raised Barack-had died that day. Obama teared up in Charlotte in the afternoon, one lone drop on his cheek and his voice catching, just once, as he talked about her being "a very humble person and a very quiet person, she was one of those quiet heroes that we have all across America." He pushed through the swell of emotion. "In this crowd there are a lot of quiet heroes like that, mothers and fathers and grandparents who have worked hard and sacrificed all their lives. And the satisfaction that they get is seeing that their children, or maybe their grandchildren or great-grandchildren, live a better life than they did. That's what America is about."

A promised land-what it has always been about. It is through this self-conception that America has fit itself most powerfully into the greatest of human narratives: the journey narrative, of the elusive "up ahead," and of those who usher us forward with sacrifice and faith but cannot themselves cross over. So it seemed fitting in a way that "Toot," the quiet hero, could not "be there with us," as her black grandson, the boy she had loved so dearly, finally led the way into Canaan.

Obama reconciled himself to being a vessel for this narrative, although he knew its perils. So in Mana.s.sas he tried not to say too much about what he would do when, along with all those surging behind him, they reached this promised land. It was an idea, after all, more than a place. But in the hopeful electricity of the air, a careful-enough listener might have heard this tension, between symbol and reality, crackle softly. What substance of triumph to come, what feat of world-beating diplomacy or legislative derring-do, could shine as brightly as this victory of emblem and ideal?

"I have just one word for you," Obama intoned to the crowd. "Just one word, a single word: tomorrow. Tomorrow."

Then he ran through the obligatory riffs about policies encouraging "hard work and sacrifice," reinvesting "in our middle cla.s.s" and giving everybody "a chance to succeed." But not too much of this. People didn't care to hear more than a few familiar cadences of these old plat.i.tudes of slow, steady progress and fair play. So he wrapped it up, this final campaign speech, by reaching back for his best stuff, a tale he hadn't told since Iowa and the primary, the story of down-and-out Obama, from back when "n.o.body gave us much of a chance."

It was really a preacher's riff-of being lost and finding redemption-and even if the audience tonight hadn't heard this particular story, they knew how it must turn out. So he worked it up, full of relish, recalling how he was limping along the campaign trail, town by town, at this point in South Carolina and without a prayer. He had somehow ended up in a field house in Greenwood on a rainy morning, about twenty people in the audience, and he was "coming down with a cold, and my back is sore," and "I am mad, I am wet, and I am sleepy.

"Suddenly I head this voice cry out behind me. 'Fired up!' I'm shocked. I jumped up. I don't know what's going on, but everyone else acts as though this were normal, and they say, 'Fired up!' Then I hear this voice say, 'Ready to go!' And the twenty people in the room act like this happens all the time, and they say, 'Ready to go!' . . . I looked behind me and there is this small woman, about sixty years old, a little over five feet, looks like she just came from church, she's got on a big church hat . . . She looks at me and she smiles and she says, 'Fired up!'

"For the next five minutes she proceeds to do this. 'Fired up?' And everyone says, 'Fired up!' And she says, 'Ready to go?' And they say, 'Ready to go!' I'm standing there and I'm thinking, I'm being outflanked by this woman. She's stealing my thunder . . .

"But here's the thing . . . after a minute or so I am feeling kind of fired up. I'm feeling like I'm ready to go. So I join the chant. It feels good. For the rest of the day, even after we left Greenwood, even though it was still raining, even though I was still not getting big crowds anywhere . . . I feel a little lighter, a little better . . .

"Here's the point, Virginia: that's how this thing started. It shows you what one voice can do, that one voice can change a room. And if a voice can change a room, it can change a city. And if it can change a city, it can change a state. And if it can change a state, it can change a nation. And if it can change a nation, it can change the world."

That last part he said softly, his voice hoa.r.s.e. Then he led them in the chant-"Fired up!" "Ready to go!"-thundering now as one hundred thousand voices, roaring through tears, sent their cries echoing across the old battlefield, just a few miles away, where the rebel yell once rang out to start a war and the century-long journey to King and then the path to Obama, cut across America to this night, full circle, in the long, fitful quest for a more perfect union.

Tonight would come about as close to that perfection as may be attainable. When the chants died down, Obama stood there and waved, calm as the thunderous din washed over him. Then his whole body seemed to exhale. Game over. He grabbed the water bottle from the lectern and downed it. Rippling in the air, claiming its place among our most essential, was that single word.

"Tomorrow."

Twenty-four hours later, a few minutes before 11:00 p.m., Barack Obama stepped onto the stage in Chicago's Grant Park as president-elect of the United States. The ground was trembling from the streets of Chicago to the fertile fields of Kansas; from Montgomery, Alabama, to San Francisco; from the Great Lakes to the coasts, and across the world. And there was something sobering, even ominous, in the shaking earth. It is one thing to rouse the pa.s.sion of a people, but quite another to lead them.

You could hear a certain relief in John McCain's gracious concession speech, the half-contented sigh of a man who could now return to the self-deprecating, no-bulls.h.i.t persona he liked best, without the fate of a nation resting on his shoulders. But for Obama, who had so powerfully joined hands with the country's yearning and beleaguered, the road ahead had only gotten more difficult. The yawning chasm now loomed between who he was and what he really intended to do.

It is a rare bond that allows a president and a nation to move as one. It forms when people, usually too busy to fuss over policy debates, see their leader as someone guided by a familiar internal compa.s.s, who will rise to meet the nation's crises in the same way they meet the challenges in their own daily lives. Policies suddenly become not just what the president does at some adviser's behest, to score a political point, but who he-or, someday, she-is. It is then that president and public enter their shared moment.

Bush rose up, harnessing his basic trust in emotion and impulse, to meet the first challenges of 9/11. But then he froze solid. The crisis, so unprecedented and fast-moving, demanded reappraisal as it unfolded and deepened. Bush, instead, kept returning to his own inner issues, his old battles and insecurities, which proved too static and too limited for the dictates of the moment. He needed to grow, and he didn't.

Obama's charmed journey would soon bring him to a similar crucible. But not just yet, not tonight. The crowds in Grant Park, those around the country and the globe, wanted for now to live in this shared moment, to live in their champion's victory and to make it theirs. It was no longer about tomorrow but about today.

And yet, inside Obama, another quality was at work, one that had remained largely hidden from view during the campaign-an antic.i.p.atory sharpness, a sensitivity to how his actions would be seen and his words taken. He tended to trust this instinct too much, to give in to his tendency to a.s.sert control, and this could cut him off from the dynamism of the present tense, from the shared moment, even though, as in Mana.s.sas the night before, it was often when he was at his best.

He had thought through this victory a thousand times before-what it would look like, what it would mean. But before he had even stepped to the stage, into that very moment for which he had been waiting his whole life, he grabbed Axelrod and told him to cancel the fireworks. Too celebratory. The country was in crisis, after all, and it was the wrong tone.

In this moment he had brought to ignition, his response was to manage expectations and gently tamp them down. The canceled fireworks would be just the beginning; the job promised to be one h.e.l.l of a challenge. As Mich.e.l.le and the girls walked back across the floodlit runway to the wings, Obama turned to deliver a speech that, from the start, would strike a subdued note. It was as much his manner as his words, which began memorably: "If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer."

And what did this answer consist in?

"It's the answer that led those, who have been told for so long, by so many, to be cynical and fearful and doubtful of what we can achieve, to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day. It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America."

In speeches over the years, Obama had often referenced his favorite line of King's: "The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice." Everyone borrows from everyone else and pays homage to their heroes. But in Obama's rendering tonight, King's arc now bent "toward the hope of a better day," skewing in this bright direction for the simple fact of his election.

What change really had come, beyond the extraordinary fact of his arrival, was not clear-nor clarified in this speech. Instead, the president-elect retreated from his opening salvo, dialing back expectations: "This victory alone is not the change we seek," he explained. "It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you."

None of this kept anyone from weeping and cheering, not his avowals that the "road ahead will be long" or that our "climb will be steep." They were dancing in Kenya, and all across Africa. From South Side Chicago out across at least one country and continent, the streets filled with young and old, in inner cities and suburbs, gated communities and slums alike. It was a difficult world everyone lived in, each day, but tonight was the long-awaited counterpoint to all that, to the wars, the collapsing economy, and that growing sense, in the long Bush twilight, of being leaderless.

But you can miss the moment, even the one you've been waiting for your whole life.

Not that the crowd could be quelled or could see in Obama, in his Kennedy suit hanging perfectly from his angular shoulders, anything but the confidence of a true leader and the promise of better days, brighter skies. People were overcome. Even the ever-compet.i.tive Jesse Jackson, a few rows back from the stage-a man who carried King's bags and long thought he would be the man's heir onstage tonight-wept like a child, tears soaking his weathered face. It was no different on either side of him, or among those crowded a mile back from the first row. Everyone let the moment's emotion run through them.

Everyone except the man on the stage.

He had tried on his presidential voice, flatter and soberer than the night before, to see how it fit, to see if any posture or presentation, much less word or deed, could rise to meet the roaring hopes of this expectant crowd. But it hadn't fit-at least not like it had the night before in Mana.s.sas. And the theater of the campaign had suddenly given way to a sobering reality: he was going to be the president. Something in that lofty t.i.tle, for all his demonstrable talents, didn't fit.

After five minutes of waving to the ma.s.sed convulsions, Obama stepped down into the stage's tented wings, where Mich.e.l.le, the woman who knew everything, knew him when he was Barry and sat up nights with him wondering what sort of life they could look forward to, raised her palm for a high-five, her face aglow.

He took her raised hand and gently lowered it. Not tonight, he whispered. Not tonight.

7.

The B-Team.

The day after the election, Obama got up early, donned a sweatshirt and White Sox cap, and stepped out into a brisk Chicago morning. The autumnal tranquility of early November was already giving way to the frosty throes of winter in Chicago. He quietly slipped into the health club at a friend's apartment building and by 12:30 was at his desk in an office building near Hyde Park meeting David Axelrod and his transition chief, John Podesta.

A best-kept secret could now begin openly to bear rewards: Podesta had been meeting with the candidate since June to prepare him for a transition to the presidency. Word of this preemptive planning had been closely guarded to avoid the impression of ent.i.tlement to victory.

Obama said later that, because of the economic crisis, "In some ways, my presidency began in September of 2008." His words and deeds-consulting with Paulson about his efforts at Treasury, or meeting with congressional leaders about emergency measures-carried the weight of presidential engagements. At that point, he was almost like the leader of the opposition in a Parliamentary model, supporting ministers, like Paulson and Bernanke, in their emergency actions.

By late September, when polls started to show him pulling firmly into the lead, Podesta secretly called together former chiefs of staff to help Obama sketch out his presidential future.

They met in a Reno hotel. Two former Clinton chiefs of staff, Erskine Bowles and Leon Panetta, joined Podesta, also a former Clinton chief of staff, and a clutch of Obama's oldest and closest advisers, Jarrett, Axelrod, and Rouse. Also called in was William Daley-son of Chicago's former mayor, brother of its current one-who had been commerce secretary and deputy chief of staff to Clinton. He was now a senior executive at JPMorgan Chase. Each brought a list of potential appointees for senior positions, as well as their most incisive advice for the management challenges Obama was about to face.

"If I win, what advice can you guys give me" about how to proceed? Obama queried.

Erskine Bowles cut right to the chase. "Leave your friends at home," he said. "They just create problems when you get to Washington."

Jarrett and Axelrod looked on, dumbfounded.

The former chiefs nodded. They'd all been in White Houses where old friends or senior campaign aides found themselves lost and ineffective in managing a presidency. Panetta talked about the need for a strong chief of staff who could run the White House and, himself, command loyalty and accountability, but always be in sync with the president. Bowles agreed. "You can't run this operation on your own-you need to have someone solid you can rely on so you can be president." As this discussion progressed, Obama cut them off. "Sounds like you're talking about Rouse." There were smiles all around-everyone in the room was a Rouse fan-but Pete demurred. He said being chief wasn't right for him at this point for a variety of personal reasons. He felt he'd be better as the trusted guy Obama could call into the Oval Office to talk about tough issues, just one-on-one. "Well, not now," Obama nodded, "but maybe later."

The attendees then spent hours offering their best suggestions for the chief job and other senior positions. The name of Rahm Emanuel never came up.

He had not been a perfect friend to the Obama campaign. Caught between his allegiances to Obama and Clinton during the primary, he opted to "hide under his desk," in his words, rather than endorse either candidate, and never did much to a.s.sist in the general election.

In the ensuing six weeks, Obama had often thought of the Reno meeting. As one close adviser said, "I think he heard everyone in the room, but deep down he felt that his charm and intelligence would be plenty to handle these management issues, which of course often sneak up on presidents to show how important they can be."

By November 4, Obama had narrowed his chief of staff choices down to two names: Tom Daschle and Rahm Emanuel, who'd been recommended by the Chicagoans, including Axelrod.

Sitting that afternoon with Podesta and Axelrod, with the ink barely dry on his electoral victory, Obama knew that picking the chief of staff was job one. The position is widely recognized to be among the most powerful among nonelected officials in the executive branch, possibly in the entire government. The compare-and-contrast between the two men was simple: in Daschle, Obama would get a like-minded partner, calm, intelligent, and surprisingly firm; in Emanuel, the yang to his yin, someone excitable, action-oriented, and by certain accounts ruthless. Emanuel was in many ways Obama's ant.i.thesis, but as the campaign wore on, especially in the weeks leading up to November 4, it had become clear that Obama was leaning toward the pugnacious congressman.

Emanuel was, of course, a widely known ent.i.ty, a D.C. fixture with a reputation for a two-fisted style of politics and boundless tactical energy. Though the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House, he had even loftier ambitions. It was universally known that he hoped to be the chamber's first Jewish Speaker. Two decades younger than Pelosi and her two deputies, who were all approaching seventy, Emanuel seemed a shoo-in to take the job one day.

But he also came with White House experience, having worked for Clinton as political director in the 1990s, in what everyone agreed had been a tumultuous tenure. Dubbed "the enforcer," Emanuel was at one point demoted for being abrasive, only to reemerge as the tactical force behind NAFTA. He went on to engineer a series of small-bore Clinton initiatives before leaving in 1998 to take a job in finance.

Like many Democrats in exile from the late '90s on, "Rahmbo," as he was jokingly known, monetized his talents. With no MBA and little business experience, he was nonetheless able to secure a job as a managing director at the investment bank Wa.s.serstein Perella, which netted him more than $16 million during his brief tenure. Insofar as it was always clear that he'd return to government, the compensation makes sense, said one former investment chief, a fan of Emanuel's, who now works in Washington: "Paying someone who will be a future government official a lot of money for doing very little? On Wall Street we call that an investment."

By 2002, when he was elected to Congress, Emanuel already knew the upstart state senator with the funny name and presidential ambitions. They were not close friends but, like a pair of ions, had an opposites-attract quality that was instantly apparent. At a roast of Emanuel during a Chicago fund-raiser in 2005, Obama, cool and coy, with his flawless timing, zinged the emotive Emanuel, claiming the onetime ballet dancer had adapted Machiavelli's The Prince to dance, "with a lot of kicks below the waist." Obama went on to explain that the loss of a middle finger in a teenage mishap with a meat slicer had left Emanuel "practically mute." The crowd roared. But when he had finished with the barbs, Obama offered a concise, accurate description of his colleague.

"Rahm is a little intense," Obama had said. "He's strong, he's aggressive, he's emotional, he's moody."

Why Obama would want a right-hand man with these qualities-especially the last two-was puzzling to a few senior members of his campaign staff. One later remarked, "Rahm's all impulse and action, with very modest organizational skills. This was not a mystery to people who'd worked with him. Either Obama didn't know that, which is unlikely, or he didn't care."

The campaign's innermost circle, meanwhile, was all slipping into key roles. The three "senior advisers" would be David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and Pete Rouse. Right behind them was a trio that had been with Obama since 2004: Robert Gibbs, who would become press secretary; Bill Burton, deputy press secretary; and Jon Favreau, now all of twenty-seven, as head speechwriter.

These decisions were all but foregone conclusions, but others would prove thornier. Obama's toughest calls, everyone knew, would concern his economic team.

In a single day of informed consent, the Windy City had become the de facto center of American politics. While President Bush and Washington plodded through a lame-duck season, Democrats were mulling over what they would do come January 20. Insiders and policy experts found themselves heading from Washington to Chicago, for a chance to bend the president-elect's ear.

The day after the election, Peter Orszag booked a flight to Chicago for the following week. He had much less personal experience with Obama than many of those-especially from the campaign-who hoped to score a position on the economic team. In the midst of the September crisis, Orszag-who held one of Washington's most influential jobs as head of the Congressional Budget Office-watched from afar as a veritable who's who of economists gathered around the senator. Despite his lengthy tenure in the capital, he'd met Obama on only a few occasions, but the young senator seemed to speak clearly to Orszag's "super-wonk" sensibilities.

Orszag was a bona fide academic phenomenon who blew through Princeton for his bachelor's (summa) and went on to get a master's while a Marshall Scholar at the London School of Economics, where he later received his PhD. He could think in numbers, talk in full sentences, and he worked nonstop, all of which impressed the era's ubiquitous mentor to young economists, Bob Rubin. Ever nearby through these years was another, even more accomplished Rubin protege, twenty years past his wunderkind moment of becoming, at twenty-eight, one of the youngest tenured professors ever at Harvard. That of course was Larry Summers, who became Treasury secretary in 1999, around the time that Orszag was promoted to senior economic adviser to the president. When Larry and Peter met across the conference table in those days, staffers joked that the Treasury Department could add to tax receipts by selling tickets. They both felt ent.i.tled to "smartest guy in the room" honors-and, after all, how could there be two?

During the Bush era, when Summers began his stint as Harvard president, Orszag became a senior fellow in economic studies at the renowned Brookings Inst.i.tution and then in 2005 became director of the Hamilton Project, a think tank within Brookings set up by Rubin to bring hard-eyed a.n.a.lysis to long-standing liberal positions.

That's when he first met Senator Barack Obama. After more than a decade in D.C., Orszag was no stranger to what he referred to as the "Senate gestalt." One custom obliged him to pick his seat only after a senator had picked his or her own. So when he walked into Obama's office, Orszag found himself standing around awkwardly, waiting for the senator to sit down.

Finally he asked, "Senator Obama, where should I sit?"

Obama looked at him perplexedly. "I sit where you aren't," he directed. "I'm not into this whole alpha-senator thing."

From there, it got even better. A policy geek, Orszag was p.r.o.ne to tangents and often lost listeners in his love of esoteric facts. So as the conversation with Obama wandered, Orszag, in typical fashion, found himself citing a vaguely relevant study out of the Brookings Inst.i.tution. "I know exactly the study you're talking about," Obama interjected, catching the never-one-to-be-outwonked Orszag entirely off guard. "I thought it was interesting how . . ." And off he went.

Orszag was bowled over. There was simply no way Obama's staff had distracted him with such obscure policy studies. The guy was the real deal. There are few things as awing or as humbling to a professional whiz kid like Orszag as the realization that among the nation's senators, a group he was accustomed to having to sway toward intellectual sunlight, there was someone as smart as he was, if not smarter still.

These thoughts played through Orszag's mind as he made his way to Chicago for his job interview with the leader-in-waiting of the free world. Because of his day job, Orszag had to handle matters with the utmost delicacy: no calls to his office from anyone in the Obama campaign, only to his cell phone and only after work hours. He was, after all, in one of the last true honest-broker positions in the federal government, heading up the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office.

The "bipartisan" tag was hard-won and ever more the key to CBO's franchise. With its hundred number-crunching a.n.a.lysts-both Democrats and Republicans-the office served as Congress's official scorekeeper, offering the consensus view of a given law's impact on the federal budget. Not that everyone heeded CBO's projections, but at least someone was keeping score.

During his years in D.C., Orszag had come to be a leading expert on what, year by year, the government was recognizing as its greatest existential threat: the rising cost of health care. When he had arrived in Washington in the mid-1990s, in the wake of Clinton's failure to reform the health care system, Medicare and Medicaid spending-though only a fraction of what they would become-were already showing steady increases driven by rising medical costs. The cost of health care had, in short, moved onto the political radar. But in typical D.C. fashion, the problem could not really be confronted until it was matched with a politically viable solution.

So this was what Orszag looked for-and what he found. The place was Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, and the man was named Jack Wennberg.

A quiet revolution in medicine had begun in 1967. Wennberg, a headstrong and independent thinker, was settling in Vermont after a postgraduate stint at Johns Hopkins. His research interest had been piqued by President Johnson's recently established programs, Medicare and Medicaid, the data on which, in those days, were easily obtained, rich, and complete. By virtue of the large population these programs embraced, Wennberg found he could suddenly track medical outcomes across a vast sea of patients. What he found was startling. Thousands of risky and expensive procedures were being performed each year without any likely medical value.

This conclusion took a while to come to, but strong clues were evident from the very beginning. In a pair of demographically similar counties Wennberg looked at in Vermont, there were wide variations, he found, in the numbers of common procedures performed. Some were conducted two or three times as often in one county as in its neighbor. But despite this, there was virtually no variation in medical outcome. People got sick and died from the conditions in question at all but identical rates. Could this mean that some procedures had virtually no medical value? he wondered. The answer would turn out to be yes, and Wennberg, who was treated for years as a dangerous heretic by America's medical papacy, eventually founded the Dartmouth Atlas Project and a new school of "evidence-based" medicine.

By the early 2000s the medical establishment had reluctantly conceded the basic soundness of the so-called Wennberg Variation. The inst.i.tute built around his early breakthroughs had in the meantime gathered similar data from across the country. The purview of evidence-based medicine had widened to embrace thornier issues about the stunning variance between both practice and cost. Some hospitals, for instance, were charging twice as much as others, with no discernable added value for patients. Certain procedures appeared to come into vogue based on revenues per hour, rather than on their provable medical value. Most d.a.m.ning of all were the supply-driven findings, which showed that the number of specialists in a given geographic area often determined the number of procedures performed there. Twice as many gynecological surgeons meant twice as many hysterectomies. The same correlations applied with orthopedic surgeons and back operations, cardiac surgeons and heart shunts, and so forth.

For Orszag this was evidentiary heaven. With accountability and data-driven rigor, Dartmouth's findings pointed the way toward improved treatment at lower cost. What could be better? Wennberg himself called medicine to that point "an unmanaged, evidence-free experiment." And it was time to bring both management and evidence to bear. The government, as the biggest single source of medical payments, was clearly the sole body with the will and power to do this. If it could embrace even a fraction of the Dartmouth methodologies, health care would be improved and the federal budget rescued.

By the time Orszag became head of the CBO in January 2007, he was carrying the Dartmouth charts to congressional meetings and preaching to anyone who would listen about the "evidence-based" cure for rising medical costs. Though he'd had only a few discussions with Obama during this period about health care, he was comforted to find that the senator knew about the Dartmouth revolution and could recite a variety of its key findings.

Now, even though his meeting was not until ten o'clock the next morning, Orszag couldn't help but be excited. The lame-duck Congress and administration had been phoning it in. The CBO's docket was relatively light, and Orszag had made it his 2008 goal to take a crack at breaking down the fiduciary metrics of health care reform. In only a month, in December 2008, CBO would release its own health care tome, offering one of the most detailed a.n.a.lyses of what reforming medical finances would look like.

The fiscal and evidentiary reform of health care consumed Orszag-so much so that now, on the plane to Chicago, he considered an ultimatum: he would accept the job offer only if Obama could look him in the eye and say that health care reform would top year one's domestic agenda. He had heard through back channels, namely from Rahm Emanuel and Jason Furman, that Obama's eyes were on this prize. But given the economic disaster of the last few months, Orszag was uneasy. Nothing was ever certain in politics, and his worries could be pacified only by his hearing it from Obama's mouth.

Deplaning in Chicago, Orszag flipped on his smartphone to check for e-mails and saw a note pop up from Michael Froman, Obama's transition team hiring chief: Peter, the 10 a.m. meeting won't be necessary. You are good to go for OMB.

Orszag was dumbfounded. Good to go? Surely Obama would want to at least chat before offering him such an important job. Orszag called Froman immediately.

"Michael," he said, "I'm already in Chicago. It might not be necessary for OMB, but I really want to meet with Obama."

Froman seemed surprised. "Hmm. Let me see what I can do," he said. "I'll call you right back." An instant later he did. "Okay! We'll do it. See you tomorrow."

"Great, thanks," Orszag managed, not quite sure what to think.