What kind of a president would Obama be?

updated 4:28 p.m. ET Oct. 20, 2008

WASHINGTON - For all Barack Obama's talk about change, there are signs that in style — if not substance — a new White House under Democrat Obama would operate much like the current one under President George W. Bush.

Think discipline, efficiency and secrecy. These are hallmarks of Obama's campaign, just as they have been for the last eight years in the leak-proof, tightly managed Bush administration.

If Obama becomes the nation's 44th president, however, the extraordinary history-making aspects of his ascension could for a time overshadow almost everything else.

The nation would have its first black leader, one of its youngest presidents ever and someone with a varied, even exotic, background. The book on the United States' checkered history of race relations would add a new chapter. And even if Obama's honeymoon was short-lived, the world would see America in a new light.

There are other ways, small and large, that an Obama White House promises to usher in newness.

Obama's two daughters, at ages 10 and 7, would be the youngest residents to roam the White House since 9-year-old Amy Carter tagged along with President Jimmy Carter and his wife in 1977. Obama's poise at the podium would end an era of water-cooler jokes about presidential malapropisms.

On issues, Obama's approach on everything from Iraq to health care would look much different from the last eight years. He has pledged to preside over an unconventional style of politics and policy development virtually blind to party, an intriguing possibility even if hard to trust after years of divisive partisanship.

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Circumstances often spring game-changing surprises on a new president. But how candidate Obama has managed his campaign, and what he's promised along the way, offer hints of how a President Obama would govern.

Obama, like Bush, demands an orderly shop.

Aides are expected to be both tightlipped and tight-knit. They get a "no drama" speech upon hire. And even if that rule is violated, histrionic disagreements over strategy, policy or personality are expected to stay behind closed doors, and they actually do. Most events come off like clockwork.

Obama's style as a candidate predicts a chief executive officer-style president, one who delegates rather than micromanages.

It's the same model as for Bush, the nation's first president with a masters in business administration. It derives in part from something the two men have in common: natural political gifts that set them on a path to the White House that took shortcuts around much government experience. That means policy experts are needed for heavy lifting.

The 47-year-old Obama hasn't finished his first term in the U.S. Senate, and before that had just eight years as a state lawmaker under his government belt.

Obama, like Bush, relies most on a small, hard-to-penetrate inner circle. It's been a successful formula, but can irk power players in his party and in Congress, who sometimes see Team Obama as too insular. This image was only fed by the decision to place Obama's campaign headquarters far from Washington in Chicago and the way his campaign used the Internet and grass-roots supporters, more than party bosses, to capitalize on the Obama phenomenon.

Obama's discipline is less about the importance of secrecy and more about making the organizational trains run on time, said Princeton University political historian Julian Zelizer.

Bush and Obama stand for very different things, says Zelizer, but Obama "runs his campaign with the same sort of methodical efficiency and closed nature of the Bush White House."

"He's not going to have a freewheeling White House where people are free to go out on their own and do what they want and be allowed to talk to the press," Zelizer said.

Sen. Dick Durbin, a longtime Obama friend and fellow Illinois Democrat, says Obama created a tight ship in part by being willing to hear things he doesn't like from aides, and by not ripping into them when mistakes were made. "There were setbacks, but there was no bloodletting," he said.

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