These personnel picks reflect Obama's multicultural background, which also is why his election has been cheered by many overseas. The son of an African man, he spent childhood years in Indonesia and likes to recall that his first roommates in college were Indian and Pakistani.
Those blood ties and personal experiences inform Obama's world view and, he argues, will help promote America's image overseas.
"If you can tell people, 'We have a president in the White House who still has a grandmother living in a hut on the shores of Lake Victoria and has a sister who's half-Indonesian, married to a Chinese-Canadian,' then they're going to think that he may have a better sense of what's going on in our lives and in our country," he has said.
In his top appointments, Obama seems drawn to others whose lives transcend borders, too, and who may, as a consequence, be more in tune with a globalized financial and political environment.
Treasury Secretary-designate Timothy Geithner grew up in Africa, Tokyo, New Delhi and Bangkok. The likely pick for national security adviser, James Jones, was raised in France. The next White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, has an Israeli father. Senior White House adviser Pete Rouse has a Japanese mother. The parents of Cabinet secretary Chris Lu are Chinese.
Like other smart people, Obama prefers to surround himself with smart thinkers. Superior intelligence will be the coin of the realm in his White House, the one variable that connects those in top policymaking positions.
Those joining him in Washington have scaled the heights of achievement - often, like Obama, from modest beginnings. It's no surprise that his early favorite for vice president was said to be Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, a bright politician with Midwestern roots who interrupted his studies at Harvard Law School for a life-changing Jesuit teaching mission in Honduras.
Some commentators have been quick to slap the "best and the brightest" label on Obama's choices. The allusion, not entirely flattering, is to John F. Kennedy's circle of influential aides, which included some of the leading intellectuals of the time. JFK's Cabinet looked like him and reflected the leadership of mid-20th-century America: It was all-white and all-male.
Like the old Kennedy crowd, many Obama insiders have Ivy League degrees, as does the president-elect (Columbia University, Harvard Law).
