Meet Melody Barnes

Viewers tuning into President-elect Obama's announcement of his economic team Monday morning in Chicago may have been surprised to see an unfamiliar face or two.

There's been a lot of talk about Tim Geithner, Barack Obama's choice to be Treasury Secretary. And there's been a lot of talk about Lawrence Summers, Obama's pick to head the National Economic Council. But viewers may not have known as much about a prominent African American woman standing behind the president-elect.

Her name is Melody Barnes, Obama's choice to lead his Domestic Policy Council. Currently co-director of the agency review working group for Obama's transition team, Barnes served in the Obama campaign as senior domestic policy advisor. Before that, she was executive vice president for policy at the Center for American Progress and served as chief counsel to Senator Edward Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

In an interview with the transition team's video crew, Barnes says she traveled all across the country and met with people during the campaign and sees her new position as an opportunity to work on issues that voters discussed, including health care, educational reform and accountability.

Barnes said the new administration would "get rid of our flawed economic philosophy" and set about the work of "creating new jobs" and "greening our economy."

Educated at the University of North Carolina and the University of Michigan Law School, Barnes brings to the White House a "brilliant legal mind," according to Obama, who praised his new domestic policy adviser on Monday for her "long experience working to secure the liberties on which this nation was founded and secure opportunity for those left behind."

She may be the first black woman to serve as White House domestic policy adviser, although that information has not yet been independently confirmed. President Bush chose Claude Allen, a black man, to be his domestic policy adviser, but Allen resigned in February 2006, shortly before he was caught up in a scandal.