In Transition

And let's not forget Rahm Emanuel, who will leave Congress to be Obama's White House chief of staff. And that's without even counting Obama himself or Vice President-elect Joe Biden, the all-Senate ticket. (At this rate, will they ever fill Obama's Senate seat?)

This is a far larger component than George W. Bush had in his first term. His Cabinet picks with Senate backgrounds -- Attorney General John Ashcroft and Energy secretary Spencer Abraham -- mainly satisfied the tradition of giving Cabinet posts to lawmakers who had just lost their re-election races, as Ashcroft and Abraham both had.

By comparison, both Bush's father and Bill Clinton had a more similar pattern of packing their Cabinets with ex-lawmakers. Clinton hired Lloyd Bentsen away from his Texas Senate seat to become Treasury secretary, Mike Espy away from his Mississippi House seat to become Agriculture secretary, and Les Aspin away from his Wisconsin House seat to become Defense secretary.

George H.W. Bush had Jack Kemp, recently retired from his New York House seat, as Housing and Urban Development secretary, and former Rep. Manuel Lujan, Jr. of New Mexico as Interior secretary -- not to mention a certain Wyoming congressman named Dick Cheney, who became his Defense secretary.

The lesson of these examples is that simply stocking your Cabinet with congressional veterans doesn't guarantee, in itself, that your relations with Congress will be better because of it.

Clinton didn't have an easy time with Congress in his first two years, even though it was controlled by his own party, simply because he had a few ex-members in his Cabinet. And, of course, the mere fact that Ashcroft had been a senator didn't make him any more forthcoming when Congress asked for information on war on terrorism practices.

But it certainly won't hurt to have people like Daschle handling initiatives like health care, which will demand a sophisticated understanding of how Congress works. Some of the non-Cabinet advisers with Hill backgrounds, like Emanuel as chief of staff, will play even bigger roles as they help plot overall congressional strategy.

The raid on Congress shows how Obama's view of talent has been shaped by his Senate experience, as brief as it was. If nothing else, it shows "a savvy about how little a president can do without Congress," according to congressional expert Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute.

That, in itself, will be a notable change from the last eight years.