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President-elect Barack Obama may stand for change, but he's turned to some powerful Washington insiders to help him staff the nation's top communications regulator, the Federal Communications Commission.

Picking the FCC chairman may not be the top priority for the Obama transition team, which is focused on naming a Treasury secretary tasked with ending the economic crisis, and appointing foreign policy leaders who will need to navigate two wars and other pressing diplomatic issues. Still, the Obama Administration will need to put some emphasis on finding a deft leader to head up the agency responsible for regulating TV, radio, and other telecommunications services. The new Administration is expected to give greater prominence to emerging providers of communications products and services, such as Google (GOOG)—a departure from the Bush Administration, which has tended to favor traditional providers such as AT&T (T).

In making the choice, the Obama team is considering appointing the first African American woman to the post, while it also fields recommendations from advisers who served in the FCC under President Bill Clinton. Heading up the selection process is Henry Rivera, partner at Washington law firm Wiley Rein. Headed by former FCC Chairman Richard Wiley, Wiley Rein has represented such companies as AT&T, Verizon Communications (VZ), Viacom (VIA), Motorola (MOT), and Sirius Satellite Radio (SIRI).

Short List of FCC Candidates

Rivera was the first Hispanic FCC commissioner, serving from 1981 to 1985, and is considered an advocate for local telcos, wireless companies, and cable TV providers. "Henry is a wise man, a bipartisan with lots of experience," says John Muleta, former head of the FCC's Wireless Telecommunications Bureau and now CEO of M2Z, an emerging wireless broadband provider.

Rivera, who is not interested in the position, has drawn up a short list of candidates that includes two African American women, according to a person familiar with Rivera's thinking. One is Julia Johnson, a Florida consultant who chairs Video Access Alliance, an advocacy and advisory group for independent, emerging, and minority networks and Internet content providers. Johnson is also on the board of MasTec (MTZ), a contractor that designs and builds telephone, broadband, electric, and other networks. She didn't return a call or an e-mail. Rivera was not available for an interview.

Another possibility: Mignon Clyburn, who has been a commissioner for the Public Service Commission of South Carolina since 1998. After earning a bachelor's degree in banking finance and economics from the University of South Carolina, she worked as a newspaper editor and was general manager and publisher for the local Coastal Times. Clyburn is a daughter of House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, South Carolina's most prominent black politician. Clyburn declined to comment for this story.

Obama's team is also weighing recommendations from former FCC Chairmen Bill Kennard and Reed Hundt, both of whom advised the Obama campaign on telecommunications-related issues.

(CNN) -- President-elect Barack Obama is looking forward to Monday's White House transition talks with President Bush and is already examining ways to make a quick impact upon taking office, top Obama aides said Sunday.

"I think it was very gracious of President Bush to invite him so early -- usually it happens a little later in the process," Valerie Jarrett, one of the transition team's co-chairs, told reporters.

"I think because of the daunting challenges that are facing our country, President Bush thought it was important to move forward quickly."

A prominent Democratic source close to Obama said Jarrett is also Obama's choice to be named to take over his seat in the Senate, though Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich would have the final say over a replacement.

And John Podesta, the other co-chair, said the talks are likely to cover "a broad range of issues" -- but the slumping U.S. economy is expected to dominate the discussion.

Podesta told CNN's "Late Edition" that Obama will push Congress to enact "at least part" of an economic package before he takes office in January, but said the problems Americans face need short-term and long-term approaches.

"It's clear that we need to stabilize the economy, to deal with the financial meltdown that's now spreading across the rest of the economy. The auto industry is really, really back on its heels," Podesta said.

And Obama's designated White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said the government needs to consider "fast-forwarding" $25 billion in low-interest loans already approved by Congress to help the Big Three U.S. automakers retool for more efficient vehicles.

"They are an essential part of our economy and our industrial base," Emanuel told CBS' "Face the Nation." He added: "There are existing authorities within the government today that the administration should tap to help the auto industry."

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, both Democrats, urged Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson over the weekend to extend the $700 billion bailout of the financial industry to shore up the ailing Ford, Chrysler and General Motors, which have been battered by the credit crisis and poor sales of gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles. But Treasury spokesperson Brookly McLaughlin said Sunday that the department remains focused on the financial sector and restarting stalled lending.

Podesta said Congress could extend unemployment benefits for laid-off workers and provide assistance to states grappling with increased Medicaid costs quickly. But he said efforts to improve schools, expand health-care coverage and wean the nation's energy industry away from imported fuels "need to be tackled together."

And he told "Fox News Sunday" that the incoming administration is conducting an extensive review of Bush's executive orders, looking for quick changes that Obama can make from his first day in office. Watch more on the team's working weekend »

"As a candidate, Senator Obama said that he wanted all the Bush executive orders reviewed and decide which ones should be kept and which ones should be repealed and which ones should be amended, and that process is going on. It's been undertaken," Podesta said.

Podesta said Obama's team will be "looking at -- again, in virtually every agency -- to see where we can move forward, whether that's on energy transformation, on improving health care, on stem cell research."

Podesta said there is a lot the president can do without waiting for Congress, and voters can expect to see Obama do so to try to restore "a sense that the country is working on behalf of the common good."

Bush and Obama are set to meet Monday afternoon at the White House's Oval Office. Watch report from CNN's Kathleen Koch on meeting Monday »

"I'm sure they'll be open and frank, as I'm sure they've always been able to talk to one another," Jarrett said. "So I think it's a good sign for this country that they're having this meeting when they're having it, and we look forward to the days and weeks ahead."

At the same time, first lady Laura Bush will take Obama's wife, Michelle, on a tour of the executive mansion. iReport.com: What's your message for Obama?

Podesta said cooperation with Bush administration officials has been "excellent" since Tuesday's election.

In Pictures: Who's Shaping Obama's Economic Agenda

President-elect Barack Obama has laid out a broad plan to deal with the economic crisis, promising to enact a fiscal stimulus to promote job growth in the early days of his presidency if Congress does not get to it within the next few weeks.

"Immediately after I become president, I will confront this economic crisis head-on by taking all necessary steps to ease the credit crisis, help hardworking families, and restore growth and prosperity," Obama said, following a meeting with a 17-member brain trust of key economic advisers.

He said that if lawmakers don't act on a stimulus package quickly, "it will be the first thing I get done as president of the United States."

Speaking to a packed hotel ballroom full of reporters in Chicago, and flanked by his all-star cast of advisers, Obama outlined four broad points to dealing with the economy. First, he wants to see middle-class rescue plan that creates jobs and extends unemployment benefits. Second, he reiterated that the financial crisis is global and his administration will work to contain it.

Third, he said his administration will review the current plan to stabilize financial markets, but he also wants to see the Treasury work closely with other government agencies to make sure families stay in their homes. Finally, Obama said he will continue to move forward with a plan that will create jobs and focus on health care, clean energy and middle-class tax relief.

Obama said he has "made it a high priority" for his transition team to help the ailing auto industry, but he reminded the crowd that the U.S. only has one president at a time. He is scheduled to meet with President Bush at the White House Monday.

In Pictures: Who's Shaping Obama's Economic Agenda?

The meeting came the day the government announced unemployment has reached a 14-year high of 6.5%, with 240,000 jobs cut in October, up from 6.1% in September and higher than the worst point of the 2001-03 recession. On Thursday, major U.S. retailers reported double-digit sales declines for October.

Selecting the economic and financial advisers to steer him through an undoubtedly rocky first few months is the most important decision facing the president-elect. Of paramount importance is who will succeed Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a Wall Street veteran who is largely responsible for the government's economic rescue package--which the Obama administration will inherit in just over two months.

The next Treasury secretary inherits a badly shaken financial system, a mandate to rein in Wall Street's excesses and hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of risky new programs ginned up by the current president to stop the bleeding.

Washington insiders say it's likely Obama will move quickly to name Cabinet nominees so that they can move through the Senate confirmation process quickly and hit the ground running in January. Obama wants to avoid the experience of President Bill Clinton, who waited until relatively late in his transition period to fill Cabinet posts. So far, Obama has made only one appointment, Rep. Rahm Emanuel. D-Ill,, a fellow Chicagoan, as his White House chief of staff.

Some of the people thought to be under consideration for the Treasury post are scheduled to attend the meeting Friday, including former Treasury secretaries Lawrence Summers and Robert Rubin, business professor and former head of the Council of Economic Advisers Laura Tyson and former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker.

Warren Buffett, the billionaire chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway (nyse: BRK - news - people ), whom bookmakers had given short odds for the Treasury post before the election, will phone in.

Conspicuously absent from the list of attendees was Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He, along with ex-Treasury Secretary Summers, are thought to be the front runners for the job. Other names being floated, with longer odds, are JPMorgan Chase (nyse: JPM - news - people ) Chief Executive James Dimon, Merrill Lynch (nyse: MER - news - people ) executive and Wall Street veteran John Thain and New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, a former Goldman Sachs (nyse: GS - news - people ) executive.

Obama's task in choosing a Treasury secretary is complicated by the situation on Wall Street. The government is taking a direct $250 billion stake in the U.S. banking system by injecting banks with capital. Because all of the nine major U.S. banks, as well as dozens of regional and smaller banks, are participating, appointing a banker could raise criticism that Obama is putting a fox in charge of the hen house.

The transition team has thrown a spotlight on the high-profile gathering because it wants to show that Obama has a steady hand on the economy, that he's listening to all sides and that he's seeking advice from well-respected leaders with significant experience in government and business.

Others in attendance included TIAA-CREF President and Chief Executive Roger Ferguson, who is a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors. With his recent central bank experience (1997-2006), he can give Obama valuable insight into how financial regulation should be restructured--a goal shared by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

Another valuable ally in this role is William Donaldson, a former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman and former chairman of the New York Stock Exchange.

Not about to be criticized that it's listening only to Wall Street, the transition team is also seeking the input of David Bonior, a former Michigan congressman and an ally of labor groups, who has been mentioned as a potential secretary of labor. Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm can provide a voice for the troubled automakers in her state. Also slated to attend, Bill Clinton's former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, whose Labor Department implemented the Family and Medical Leave Act and the Pension Protection Act.

Of course, representatives from the business community are also on Obama's panel. They include Xerox (nyse: XRX - news - people ) boss Anne Mulcahy, Time Warner (nyse: TWX - news - people ) Chief Executive Richard Parsons and Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) CEO Eric Schmidt.

The tech community has praised Obama as the first "tech president" and, if he's seeking advice from Silicon Valley, few can offer as much insight as Schmidt.

Obama said he believes that the election of a new president can inspire confidence in the economy. "I'm confident that a new president can have an enormous impact. That's why I ran for president."

Editor's note: Republican Leslie Sanchez was director of the Bush White House Initiative on Hispanic Education from 2001 to 2003 and is the author of "Los Republicanos: Why Hispanics and Republicans Need Each Other." She was not a paid consultant to any 2008 candidate. Sanchez is CEO of the Impacto Group, which specializes in market research about women and Hispanics for its corporate and nonprofit clients.

Ever since John McCain and Howard Dean in 2000 showed the Internet's potential for fundraising, the question was always whether the Web could be effective at "GOTV," or getting-out-the-vote.

Among young voters at least, Barack Obama has proven that it can -- and, in the process, he's uncovered a major flaw that cuts to the core of the Republicans' approach to party organization and discipline.

Obama poured many of his campaign's millions into his social networking operations on the Web, which his campaign rightly saw as critical to building grassroots support and enthusiasm.

A community organizer by training, occupation and nature, Obama saw his databases for the potential they represented -- an army of supportive voices, a legion of potential volunteers, and a division of precinct captains.

Such is the world not just of Chicago ward organizations, but of politics everywhere.

The McCain campaign, reflecting the broader skepticism I've seen in the GOP about the Web, doubted whether the Internet could get voters out of their Barcaloungers (or, in the case of younger voters, off their futons) and into the polling booth.

Michael Palmer, McCain's Internet director during the primaries, told ABCNews.com last June that if Obama's online efforts "don't have an endgame political benefit, then they don't help you at the end of the day."

On Tuesday, Obama showed the Republicans the Internet's endgame.

On Facebook alone, Obama signed up 2.4 million users as supporters, compared with just 624,000 for McCain. A Facebook virtual ticker challenged users to actually go out to the polls, and clocked more than 1 million by noon on Election Day and 5 million by the time all the polls closed.

According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University, the number of voters under 30 rose by 3.4 million compared with 2004.

About 66 percent of those voters supported Obama, compared with 32 percent for McCain. By contrast, the overall voting population gave Obama a much narrower margin of victory -- 53 percent to 46 percent.

In previous elections since 1976, according to CIRCLE, the percentage of young voters supporting the winning candidate varied by an average of only about 2 percentage points from the overall voting population.

At the least, young voters contributed to Obama's wins in North Carolina, Indiana, and Virginia.

When Mark Penn, then Hillary Clinton's chief strategist, chided Obama's supporters as "look(ing) like Facebook," he was right. While some of us over the age of 29 are just now mastering Twitter and Facebook, a UCLA survey of 272,000 college freshmen found that 86 percent spend "some time" each week on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Obama realized that the 70 million Americans on Facebook (the vast majority of them under the age of 30) have become accustomed to a Web experience that's interactive.

Web-based political social networking requires empowerment -- introducing well-trained, highly motivated local supporters to one another and then turning the campaign over to them.

McCain's official site included a social networking area, McCainSpace, but it was mostly an afterthought, competing for attention with messages from the candidate, campaign ads, issues summaries, photo galleries -- and of course the obligatory online donations and volunteer signups.

The Obama social networking site invited each new user to post a blog right away upon signing up. To the Obama Web team (which included one of the founders of Facebook), putting users in touch with one another was almost as important as putting the user in contact with the campaign.

Team Obama posted nearly 2,000 videos on YouTube, and the campaign contracted to build a text-messaging campaign that reached millions of voters geographically on their mobile phones. All told, it was a hefty viral marketing combination.

During the primaries, volunteers could sign in online, download a list of phone numbers and make calls from home to voters in the target states -- a virtual phone bank that other campaigns had to pay for.

Joe Trippi, the Democratic operative behind the Web-savvy Howard Dean campaign, was quoted in the New York Times noting Obama's progress: "We were like the Wright brothers," he said. Obama, on the other hand, "skipped Boeing, Mercury, Gemini -- they're Apollo 11, only four years later."

A college student and editor-in-chief of www.scoop08.com, Alexander Heffner, believes young voters were serious about voting this time around. "So many young people invested in him [Obama], unlike with Bill Clinton," Heffner told me.

The Obama campaign's use of the Internet will change campaign politics just as much as the fax machine and the autodialer did. If the GOP is going to compete in this growing tech world, they'll have to do more than just reverse-engineer the bells and whistles on Obama's Web sites.

They'll have to analyze Obama's entire approach to social networking -- a bottom-up, unruly approach that turns first-time voters into activists. That'll be easier said than done for a hierarchical organization that values order and discipline over all else (except, perhaps, seniority).

Nevertheless, if the GOP wants to compete on an even footing with the tech-savvy, social networking Obama-crats, they've got a real revolution ahead.

 

America has elected Barack Obama this week to an eminently well-deserved presidency. His phenomenal grass-roots campaign, his crisp positioning as the agent of change and his inspiring oratory has led us into the promise of a new era.

As he embarks on the journey of switching roles from a "revolutionary" to an "executive," I have a few things to say to him:

President Obama, on many accounts, you are my kind of guy. Your youthful energy, your flashing smile, your optimism, your poetry, your intellect, your willingness to learn, your calm, the obvious success of your marriage and of course, your comfort with modern technology--it all feels reassuring. I can relate to you.

But, I am not one of your fans. Not yet.

Why? I am one of those objective, open, rational intellectuals who are perfectly willing to be convinced about where you plan to take America and the world. In turn, you have promised to listen to me.

So listen, President Obama. You have led a generation of youth in a historical upheaval. This generation listens to you. They look up to you. And what are you telling them? Following your example, you are telling them to engage in politics and community service, and you are reassuring them that the government will be taking care of them.

I have a problem with this philosophy. I have a problem with the entitlement epidemic that will be the unintended consequence of your charismatic and intensely compelling rhetoric. Whatever comes out of your mouth today, and even more so, in the months and years to come, will be treated as Gospel by an entire generation. And for this, you have a responsibility about what you say to them.

Yes, you can lead the followers. But can you lead the leaders? And can you make leaders out of your followers?

You want to create 5 million new green jobs--a great goal. To create 5 million jobs, you need at least 50,000 entrepreneurs--leaders--to step up to the plate.

What, President Obama, is your message to this group that you so desperately need help from to deliver your beloved country out of this economic mess? That you will take the fruits of their toil and hand it out to those on welfare? At least that is what we are hearing in your rhetoric. Your messaging is terribly off when you try to communicate with the entrepreneurs, and it terrifies us.

All we hear is Wall Street versus Main Street. Well, we're not the looters of Wall Street. We are the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley and elsewhere--we build, we innovate, we create jobs. And to us, you have had nothing encouraging to say thus far.

You see, President Obama, leading leaders is an entirely different ballgame than leading followers. Poetry alone does not suffice. Incisive intellects ask questions that need and deserve logical answers without contradictions. When you say you will fix health care and education, we all rejoice. But then you cannot support your claims with a clear explanation of where the money to finance those plans will come from, and you lose credibility.

Leading leaders is also a discipline full of possibilities. We all have good ideas. If you are going to be our leader, we need you to listen to those ideas and incorporate them into your policies. (See "Stimulus Package For Entrepreneurs.") I have yet to hear back from you or your team.

I understand that you have been very busy. And as a strategist, I also understand that you could not have won this election by focusing on the relatively small number of entrepreneurs in America. You needed the numbers and, for that, you went to your base. You went to the masses, inspired and engaged them, and they have delivered you this presidency.

But now, we do need to hear back from you on the issue of how you plan to stimulate entrepreneurship. And we hope that you will let us advise you where we know more than you. Whether it is cleantech, education or health care, you need entrepreneurs to engage you and help you solve the problems.

I see, in many ways, reflections of another great leader in you: Mahatma Gandhi. With amazing charisma and astute understanding of grass-roots politics, Gandhi brought down the British Empire in India. But when it came time to rebuild a new India, Gandhi simply failed to rise to the occasion. He was a great revolutionary but a terrible executive.

You, President Obama, will need to be a great executive. And executive leadership is different from grass-roots leadership. It requires leading the leaders and those who will deliver you your greatest prize: job creation and prosperity.

In your victory, President Obama, you have left us unaddressed. And we cannot let you get away with that.