Obamas Make Symbolic Visit to Future Home: White House

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Raw Video: Obama Arrives at White House

President-elect Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, have arrived at the White House for a visit, his first since last week's landslide election victory.

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"I am not going to be spending too much time in Washington over the next several weeks," he said, adding that he did not want to "go lurching so far in one direction" and wanted to come up with "some good, solid, sensible options."

The topic of the remarks was not known, and Obama turned away after a staff member intervened.

Obama is moving rapidly to undo some of Bush's signature initiatives while also tackling the economic crisis and other pressing issues. His transition chief, John D. Podesta, said over the weekend that Obama may use executive orders to ease restrictions on stem cell research, change interrogation policies that Democrats oppose and slow plans for offshore oil drilling. In the longer term, Obama has pledged to end the Iraq war, reverse almost a decade of Bush economic policy and take a dramatically different approach toward health care and social policy.

Obama aides said the transition team has begun to review all of Bush's executive orders and will move forward with decisions once Cabinet secretaries have been chosen. The men did not discuss those issues at the meeting yesterday, Obama aides said.

The meeting focused on the economy, and that is what aides say will be among Obama's top priorities once he moves into the White House on Jan. 20. The president-elect has promised a quick focus on middle-class tax cuts, health care and energy independence.

Bush and Obama have emphasized cordiality since Election Day, focusing on the need for a smooth transition and, in Bush's case, hailing the historic event of Obama becoming the nation's first African American president. Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs called it "a bit of a momentous day" and said that Obama commented on the Oval Office. "I don't know that I would characterize him as awestruck. What he said to me is it's a really nice office," Gibbs said.

Obama had never set foot in the Oval Office before yesterday and has had only a handful of direct interactions with Bush, most recently during a September meeting on the economic crisis. In his book "The Audacity of Hope," Obama describes one of his earliest encounters with Bush, at a 2005 White House event for new lawmakers, when Obama, then a newly elected senator from Illinois, says Bush warned him that people from both parties will start "gunnin' for ya."

"Everybody'll be waiting for you to slip, know what I mean?" Bush said, according to Obama's account. "So watch yourself."

Obama's meeting with Bush was the latest in a 100-year tradition that has produced symbolic moments as political pasts met political futures.

In 2000, Bush met President Bill Clinton one week after the Supreme Court declared the Texas governor the winner of the closest presidential election in U.S. history. At the meeting, the pair discussed foreign challenges and economic good times. Clinton told reporters that his advice was to "get a good team, and do what he thinks is right."

Eight years earlier, it was President George H.W. Bush who was giving Clinton advice. They met for almost two hours, discussing the then-hot spots of Bosnia and Somalia, but, as is the tradition, took no questions from reporters after the meeting.

Stephen Hess, a presidential historian, said the potential for tension between Bush and Obama was great after last week's election. The economic crisis gave Obama the perfect excuse to assert his authority even before Inauguration Day on Jan. 20. But Obama publicly rejected that notion Friday, declaring that the United States has "only one president at a time" and signaling that he will not attend a global economic summit on Saturday.

Bush offered his own olive branch by pledging "complete cooperation" and calling Obama's election "especially uplifting" for a generation of Americans who witnessed the struggle for civil rights.

Hess called yesterday's visit a "symbolic moment" of the change to come. "When he walks out of the White House, he really is the president-elect," he said of Obama, adding: "It's part of the movement of power, the movement of democracy."

Research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.