In introducing his star-studded national security team featuring Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, President-elect Obama has taken another innovative step toward instilling public confidence in advance of his inauguration.

Never before has a president-in-waiting captured and capitalized on the national spotlight by using the televised news conference to condition the public to the pragmatic leadership he is telegraphing.

Much of the news-media reaction to this latest trotting-out of leading subordinates is focusing on speculation of personal relationships, especially between his often-strident primary opponent, Clinton, and Obama himself. It's hard for some to accept that the oil and water of the pre-convention period will congeal to a smooth-flowing foreign policy.

This, after all, is the Hillary Clinton whose television ad of the campaign implied that the country could not risk having Obama on the receiving end of a 3 a.m. crisis phone call. And this is the Barack Obama who dismissed her in a televised debate as "likeable enough."

On a more serious level, they differed flatly on the invasion of Iraq before it happened, Clinton voting for the Bush resolution paving the way and Obama labeling it "a dumb war,"

They also differed on diplomacy toward foreign foes, he saying he would talk to anyone without pre-conditions, she insisting otherwise.

But they agreed from the start that the next Democratic administration would have to focus intensively on ending the go-it-alone penchant of the Bush years, and a return to multilateralism in the craft of diplomacy.

During the campaign and since, both have emphasized the imperative of restoring American willingness and intent to act in concert with U.S. allies, after the last eight years that have soured respect for, and reliance on, America as a team player in international affairs.

Perhaps the most revealing nomination in the pivot from unilateralism is Obama's choice of Susan Rice, a member of President Bill Clinton's national security council and later an assistant secretary of state for African affairs, to be his United Nations ambassador.

Rice, who like Obama opposed the war in Iraq and was his close senior adviser on foreign policy in the campaign, has long been a strong defender of the U.N. and proponent of a foreign policy more decisively toward collective action under the world organization.

A major task facing her will be to overcome the bitterness among many foreign ambassadors to the U.N. over departing President Bush's bullying in 2002-03 in pursuit of full U.N. sanction for the invasion of Iraq.

In that period, in which the Security Council gave initial support but in the end declined to endorse that step, Bush argued forcefully that the U.N. would become "irrelevant" if it failed to throw its weight behind the invasion. Probably nothing more effectively built a case in the world community for multilateral decision-making on war and peace than the morass that was the Iraq war, backed by the transparently fragile coalition on which Bush finally had to rely.

Obama's decision to retain Bush's secretary of defense, Robert Gates, is more than the fulfillment of a campaign pledge to include Republicans in his administration. It indicates confidence that this least-ideological of Bush Cabinet members is motivated by pragmatism, not neoconservative philosophy, and can help steer the Obama ship through the shoals of an American foreign policy that has lost its way.

As Obama showed off his new national security team before the television cameras, Vice President-elect Joe Biden stood to the side. His very presence was a reminder that Obama's selection of the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was advertised as a way to bolster the presidential nominee's sparse foreign-policy experience.

Biden's luster may have been somewhat diminished by this montage, except that he was given the role of commenting on the qualifications of the new team and observing as Obama stood by that he had been his partner in putting the all-star group together. Still, his role inevitably will come under more scrutiny as the team gets to work next month.

Jules Witcover's latest book, on the Nixon-Agnew relationship, "Very Strange Bedfellows," has just been published by Public Affairs Press. Reach him at juleswitcover@earthlink.net.