ABSTRACT
One person called him “naive.” Another person called him “dangerously inexperienced.”Yet another person worked for his opponent for the previous three years. What these three people all had in common, however, was that they were chosen by Barack Obama to be part of his leadership team when he became president in 2009. These people, of course, would be Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Robert Gates respectively, and their selection onto the Team Obama reflected his approach of developing a “team of rivals” similar to that of his hero, Abraham Lincoln.1 Lincoln, Obama had once said, “was confident enough to be willing to have these dissenting voices and confident enough to listen to the American people and to push them outside of their comfort zone.”2 This was a stark contrast to the approach taken by his predecessor, George W. Bush, who for the most part filled his team with loyalists, friends, and people whom he had worked closely with when he was governor of Texas.
