REALITY CHECK

Posted at 7:58 a.m. ET

Amazing what a week as president-elect can do to soaring rhetoric, Heavenly promises and a general aura of saintliness.  Apparently, Barack Obama and company, lately seen walking on water, have now started to come down to the world where the rest of us reside.

The Los Angeles Times reports on the march to reality:

The president-elect who promised to overthrow Washington's partisanship and cronyism is turning to seasoned veterans -- even lobbyists -- in an apparent effort to avoid rookie mistakes.

Reporting from Washington -- Now that the confetti has fallen, the nascent administration of Barack Obama has come face to face with one of its biggest challenges: living up to the exceptionally high expectations his thrilling campaign produced among supporters and long-suffering Democrats.

Long-suffering and angry. 

So it goes as Obama makes the rocky transition from campaigning to governing.

While campaigning, he frequently decried the polarizing politics of years past.

"I am in this race because I don't want to see us spend the next year re-fighting the Washington battles of the 1990s," he said in a typical speech in South Carolina a year ago. "I don't want this election to be about the past, because if it's about the future, we all win."

Future?  Did he say future?

But his government-in-waiting is rife with officials from the Clinton administration. Podesta was a senior Clinton White House aide, as was Obama's choice for chief of staff, Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.).

Warren Christopher, who served as President Clinton's first secretary of State and is a partner at the law firm of O'Melveny & Myers in Los Angeles, is heading up the transition for the State Department, and former Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) is preparing things at the Pentagon.

It's starting to look as though Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's family empire is living on, even though she lost the Democratic primary.

Ouch.  She's lovin' it, lovin' it.

On the campaign trail, Obama cast himself as a fresh-faced alternative. One stock line was: "It's time to turn the page."

In a speech last year in New Hampshire, the Illinois senator said: "There are those who tout their experience working the system in Washington. But the problem is that the system in Washington isn't working for us and hasn't for a long time."

That was then.  Now the Obama people are people who need people, and look at the people they need:

But with the campaign won, Obama seems eager not to repeat the mistakes of Democratic predecessors who left the party mandarins feeling marginalized.

Imagine!  The One is going to the mandarins.  The sound you hear is his picture being taken down at MoveOn offices all over the country.

To burnish Obama's reformist credentials, Podesta on Tuesday rolled out what he billed as a tough set of ethics rules targeting professional lobbyists. But there was a loophole: Lobbyists could work on the transition as long as they stayed away from the policy areas that their lobbying involved.

As a candidate, Obama's language when it came to lobbyists was far more emphatic. "I have done more to take on lobbyists than any other candidate in this race -- and I've won," he said in the South Carolina speech. "I don't take a dime of their money, and when I am president, they won't find a job in my White House."

I'm reminded of the classic Hollywood story of the screenwriter who meets a producer on the back lot.  "Your script is perfect," the producer says.  I'm looking forward to the changes."

Obama's campaign was perfect.  Now we're getting the changes.

November 12, 2008.