Listener-in-chief

'I WILL listen to you," President-elect Barack Obama promised on election night, "especially when we disagree." It is a pledge that he is meeting. He picked Hillary Clinton for secretary of state despite their primary brawl, granted political clemency to ex-Democrat Joe Lieberman by letting him stay on as chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, and met with Republican presidential rival John McCain. In assembling his economic team, he hired the huge ego of Lawrence Summers. Recognizing the need for competent stability where he could find it in the Bush administration, he is keeping Defense Secretary Robert Gates. It is a team not just of rivals, but of strong personalities.

Just as progressives were beginning to carp that "change" was becoming centrist chump change, Obama tapped Melody Barnes, Ted Kennedy's former Senate Judiciary Committee chief counsel, to direct domestic policy. With the apparent approval of the president-elect, House Democrats replaced auto industry apologist John Dingell with Henry Waxman, a firebrand champion of the environment, healthcare, and public health, as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

If polls are any indication, this balance of moves is helping Obama sustain a honeymoon with the public. After eight years of a Bush administration deaf to dissent, it is encouraging to hear the new president promising to draw on a "cross-section of opinion." Any president who hears only from like-minded ideologues is likely to have a disastrous tenure.

In editorial cartoons, the president-elect's ears are often larger than life. To judge from Obama's Cabinet picks, it could be because of his healthy capacity to listen.