In an interview at his Capitol Hill office, Greenstein said he's impressed with the way Obama is tackling the economic crisis, including details that have escaped public notice up to now.
He said he was amazed to learn that senior Bush administration officials had effectively turned over the staff of the president's budget office to a "shadow" budget office created by Obama. Career professionals at the Office of Management and Budget rigorously scrubbed the costs of the Obama stimulus package, item by item, almost as if Obama were already president.
As a result of that review, Greenstein said, there is a much greater chance that Congress will be able to place a recovery plan on Obama's desk shortly after he takes office.
"This is, I think, unprecedented," he said. "I did not think one could pull this off this early."
Obama's team, he said, stuck to two key principles in putting a package together: Only proposals that could quickly stimulate the economy were included, and new spending plans that might be viewed as longer-term initiatives - rather than temporary ones - were rejected.
In more than three decades in Washington, Greenstein said, he has never seen such a broad consensus develop, across the political spectrum, on the need for a huge injection of new government spending to help the economy recover.
But when the Obama team added up all the "shovel-ready" infrastructure projects and other initiatives proposed as part of the stimulus package, "they discovered, to their dismay, that the number was nowhere near" the roughly $1 trillion target set by some economists for an overall recovery plan.
Obama has declined to put a public price tag on his proposal, but published reports have put the figure at slightly less than $800 billion over two years.
Greenstein said he is "not in the ranks of the people who are unhappy" that Obama seems to be stocking his administration with too many moderates, and he dismisses some of that criticism as the result of overly simplistic and often misleading political labeling.
Obama, in his view, has selected knowledgeable advisers who are taking into consideration "the situation of people who are in the toughest shape" economically, while at the same time recognizing that the country faces serious long-term fiscal problems that must be addressed.
"It seems to me that he inherits probably the toughest set of problems of any new president since FDR," Greenstein said. Obama seems to have the self-confidence to manage a highly talented team of strong personalities.
"Even more important, I really get a sense of a kind of iron discipline to deal with all these big problems at the same time.
"I'm sure as time goes forward, there will be things they do that I have questions about," he said. "But in terms of what's happened so far, I'm quite impressed."
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