It's not big enough to be called a shakeup, but the new hire announced this week at the White House is important: John Podesta will come on board in January as a counselor to the president.
Podesta is a Democratic wise man, the founder of the Center for American Progress, a policy and personnel incubator for Democratic administrations, and he just started a new think tank on income inequality — the problem President Obama says will animate his second term.
Podesta is also a second-term crisis management specialist. He was Bill Clinton's White House chief of staff from 1998 to 2001, helping him survive impeachment.
His hiring has already soothed some jangled nerves among the current president's supporters in Washington.
"I thought, 'Fantastic,' " says Dee Dee Myers, Clinton's former press secretary. She is one of a small, inside-the-beltway group of Democrats who have been desperate for reassurance that the recently-unsteady Obama White House was getting its act together.
With the Podesta announcement, the White House appears to have sent that message.
"I think they've known for a while that they need to reach out, they need to broaden their circle a little," Myers says. "The president has been famously reluctant to do that. So how do you widen the lens? One of the ways you do that is you reach out and you bring in new people, and it's very helpful to bring in people who come preloaded with tremendous experience."
A Fan Of Executive Powers
Podesta is not a completely new face in the Obama camp. He ran the president-elect's widely-praised transition team in 2008 and 2009, and he's been advising the White House from the outside.
Heard On 'Weekend Edition Saturday'
In November 2012, host Scott Simon talked with John Podesta about the transition from the first Obama administration to the next. Podesta served as co-chair of President Obama's 2008 transition team.