No sherpa at G-20’s DC summit

With the absence of the new president who will direct the U.S. economy over the next four years, it is not clear if such efforts will amount to anything more than a show of solidarity.

Obama says the United States has only one president at any given time and that until Jan. 20, when he is scheduled to take over the presidency, that person is President George W. Bush. He implied he did not want to step on Bush's toes until that time.

As a result, Obama's advisers have made it clear that he will not take part in the summit meeting of the Group of Twenty. In addition to the world's seven most advanced economies the G20's members include Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, S. Africa, South Korea, Turkey and the European Union.

Turkey will be represented by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The International Monetary Fund, or IMF, and the World Bank will also take part in the summit.

In Obama's absence in Washington, his team is working to arrange meetings between world leaders and his representatives, a key aide said Tuesday. "We've had requests to have meetings with representatives of the president-elect and the vice president-elect," said John Podesta, co-chair of Obama's White House transition.

"We are arranging appropriate people meetings with those leaders - people they know and they trust, and we will have more to say about that later," he said, according to Reuters. It is not clear at this point if Erdogan will agree to a meeting with Obama’s advisers, rather than the president-elect himself.

In any case, the G20 summit will be held in Bush's "lame duck" period. Worse, the policies of his administration over the past several years are seen as at least partly responsible for the breakout of the current global financial crisis. So at a time when Bush is considered to have lost his credibility on economic matters, it is not clear if his pledges will be taken seriously at the G20 summit.