Economic Crisis Offers Hints of Executive Style

By JACKIE CALMES

CHICAGO — He will not formally take power for almost six weeks, but President-elect Barack Obama is already showing some glimpses of how he will wield it.

Despite his professed resolve to stay at arms length from governance during the transition, the economic crisis has forced him to play a more active role — nowhere more so than in Washington’s scramble to avert the collapse of the Big Three automakers with a federal lifeline.

From here at what an aide called his “mini-White House,” Mr. Obama has been pulling on the levers of power far more than any president-elect in memory, using his new stature to influence events in Congress and the real White House of President Bush and yet limited in his ability — as the collapse of the auto bailout legislation in the Senate showed — to control them.