Barack Obama has long said he wanted to pull together a bipartisan administration that followed the best policies, no matter whether they were Democratic or Republican ideas.

That may sound like the usual rhetoric of a presidential candidate and president elect. After all, both President Clinton and President Bush appointed members of the other party to Cabinet positions. Clinton named William Cohen, a retired Republican senator from Maine, to be his Defense Secretary. Bush named Norman Mineta, a former Democratic congressman from California, to be his Transportation Secretary.

By most outside measures, those Cabinet officials did not foreshadow any wider effort at bipartisan government. While both men were widely respected, their impact on White House politics was minimal. Cohen was widely seen as President Clinton’s effort to shore up his hawkish credentials; Mineta’s job was hardly influential in the broader Cabinet.

Will Obama do anything different?

According to John Podesta, the co-chair of the Obama transition, the answer is yes. While reporters were focused on lobbyist rules and speculation about new Cabinet names, Podesta dropped this nugget about the president-elect’s intentions during the first transition briefing.

“He wants to see not just Democrats in office but he’s made a pledge to ensure that we reach out and have Republicans and independents, not just at a token level,” Podesta said. “There’s sort of been a tradition of having at least one person from the other party at the beginning of an administration in the Cabinet. His commitment is to deepen that and to look even just beyond the Cabinet, to try to bring people who agree with the direction that he wants to take the country and, regardless of party, to serve in the government.”

This broadens the work and the scope of the transition enormously, opening up a swathe of jobs (by most counts, several hundred positions at the subcabinet level) to a far broader set of potential job- seekers. It also undercuts Republican accusations that the single transition job announced to date – Rahm Emanuel as White House chief of staff – represents some backtracking on Obama’s campaign pledge to move beyond partisan politics.

Transition officials point to another announcement underscoring their bipartisan approach to forming a new government. While Obama himself will not meet with world leaders at the G20 meetings later this week, a prominent Republican and a Democrat will do so on his behalf: Jim Leach, the former GOP congressman from Iowa, and Madeleine Albright, the former Clinton secretary of state.