Our financial system has been in a meltdown, the war in Afghanistan is not going well, the tension between two nuclear-armed states, Pakistan and India, has dangerously escalated and the U.S. attorney has uncovered a shocking, blatant scandal involving the governor of Illinois.

Amid this sea of turbulence there is one island of calm: President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team.

He is moving, as he himself predicted, with deliberate haste to put together a government.

His appointments have been almost universally praised. He is placing competence above ideology and, maybe most important, building a White House staff that knows Washington’s ways and has the respect of congressional leaders.

The best example of why Obama is on the right track in his transition is his choice of a chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. He has experience in the White House during the Clinton administration and had risen to a key leadership role in the House of Representatives over the last eight years. If nothing else, his appointment, announced immediately after the election, shows that Obama has given considerable thought and planning to how he must staff and run his government.

Just compare the past two Democratic presidents appointed as chief of staff. Jimmy Carter made Hamilton Jordan, his top campaign official, his top White House aide in 1977. He had no Washington experience and let people know he was proud of it. Carter then proceeded to make a series of mistakes, in the timing of his priorities and alienating his potential allies on the Hill. Bill Clinton appointed Arkansas business executive Mack McLarty, a boyhood friend, as his first chief of staff. The result was a stumbling, bumbling beginning and then a loss of his majorities in the Congress.

What is impressive about Obama is, first of all, the thought he put into how to staff a government before the campaign was over.

Carter and Clinton seemed to fear that it would look presumptuous if word got out that they were planning a government even before they had been elected.

But even more important is Obama’s recognition that he must build strong ties with the Congress if he is going to be effective.

It is one thing to talk about change during a campaign and quite another to implement it in our complex system of checks and balances. While some have complained that Obama is bringing old faces to the White House, the truth is that the best way to bring about change is to have a staff that has been there and done that.

Change is about implementing new ideas that Obama is bringing to the White House himself, not having a bunch of people around him who have no experience and no clue of how to get things done.

There is also grumbling from the left that Obama is moving too much toward moderate, centrist appointments and ignoring the left wing of his party, especially in foreign policy.

But Obama seems to understand that he must try to rebuild a center coalition if he is going to be effective.

No doubt he will tack left and then right, but that is consistent with how he ran his campaign and how he said he would govern.

He wants to get away from the old labels and the old liberal versus conservative battles and find enough commonality with people from red states and people from blue states to have a governing coalition.

The trick will be not to compromise so much that he can’t make any fundamental change. Obama isn’t interested in “triangulating” in the manner of Clinton. With a Republican-controlled Congress, Clinton had to settle for incremental change, at best. That’s clearly not where Obama wants to be.

The differences between what Carter and Clinton faced and what Obama will face, of course, are starkly different. The financial crisis will dominate Obama’s first years in office. But, at the very least, he seems to have learned from Carter’s and Clinton’s early mistakes. That’s an encouraging beginning.

— James Klurfeld is a professor of journalism at Stony Brook University. His e-mail address is james.klurfeld@stonybrook.edu.