The president's got the authority to nominate or appoint more than 4,000 government positions.

And right now, Joe Biden is hiring.

So far, he's got a chief of staff, a lawyer, a few advisors, many of them old Washington hands.

You've known a lot of these characters for a long time.

Well, I did spend some time in Biden world, so it's not my first rodeo, I guess.

I got Mike Grunwald on the line.

He writes over at Politico.

Because he's something of an old Washington hand himself.

He covered Biden for years.

Certainly, he's gotten some of the old band back together.

But it's a very different deal when he's in the chair.

He always had this fascinating relationship with Barack Obama.

He would always say, you know, we got the order of this ticket right.

You know, he had run for president in 2008 and Obama had beaten him.

And he had a certain just incredible respect and even awe for Obama's talents in the same way he would also, there was kind of a slightly

condescending way he would talk about the way Obama wasn't really quite as much of a people

person as he was and didn't have as

much political understanding as he did and certainly didn't understand the Senate, you know,

with his long experience there. So it's very different for the president-elect being the

president-elect. the president-elect.

Mike says, understanding the Senate, it's one of the most important things Biden's growing staff can do. And it's a place their boss has studied for a long time. After all, the last time

Biden was in the White House, the housing crisis

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