By Michael Hirsh

In the early months of Bill Clinton’s first term as president, his White House staff treated governing like a combination dormitory bull session and frat party. It was pretty much amateur hour, and the first thing to go was discipline. But judging from the kind of people that President-elect Obama is selecting to serve as his new palace guard at the White House, his administration is going to look and feel very different—very grown up—from Day One. It’s not just that Obama’s picked a pit bull (one without lipstick) as his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. He has also chosen Gregory Craig, a tough and unrelenting legal janissary and as savvy a Washington player as you can find—as his White House counsel. And if he does as expected and names Jim Steinberg as his national security advisor (like the other two, Steinberg is an ex-Clintonite), the new president will be surrounded by disciplinarians. A master of detail as well as grand strategy, Steinberg was notable for his passionate defense of administration policies when he served as deputy national security advisor in the second Clinton administration.

There’s an emerging toughness—dare I say ruthlessness—here that feels far more Kennedy-esque than Clintonite. The discipline was evident in Obama’s own smiling shutdown of 60 Minutes’ Steve Kroft’s efforts to get him to talk about his Cabinet choices over the weekend (“You’re not going to get any more out of me, Steve”). It is evident in the new ethics rules announced late last week by Transition leader John Podesta—the strictest and most comprehensive ever. By prohibiting anyone who has lobbied or registered as a lobbyist in the last 12 months from working in the policy areas on which they lobbied, the new administration is eliminating not just K-Street corporate lobbyists but “even folks at interest groups who aren’t typically part of the what’s-wrong-with-Washington story,” says Scott Thomas, a former head of the Federal Election Commission. These include some of the Obama campaign’s own advisors who worked on not-for-profit issues like human rights, environment and labor

Make no mistake: This is all the president-elect’s doing. He wanted Emanuel on board to “watch his back.” And he asked Craig to be White House counsel—though Craig might have preferred national security advisor—because he wanted to keep him close to the Oval Office as well. Craig, after all, had successfully defended Bill Clinton at his impeachment trial. (Obama’s consideration of Hillary Clinton as secretary of State might have been a factor in Craig's getting Counsel rather than NSC. Craig had fiercely attacked Sen. Clinton during the primaries for her attacks on Obama’s readiness, causing bad blood between them. But Hillary Clinton and Craig have been friends since they first met in 1969 when they started law school at Yale together.) As for Steinberg, I can say from personal experience in covering the Clinton administration’s foreign policy that he’s a guy who never, ever gives up an inch on any front, and that he always had (to my memory) a sophisticated defense ready for even some of the more questionable Clinton-era decisions. It is notable that Obama had no more dedicated foreign-policy advisor during his two-year campaign than Susan Rice, but she is apparently being shunted aside in favor of the more senior, more experienced, and certainly more ready, Steinberg.

Sure, all these guys were Clintonites themselves at the beginning. But 16 years later, they’re older, tougher and wiser. Or at least that’s what we’re hearing.