CHICAGO — The bustling Obama headquarters on North Michigan Avenue invites comparisons to a start-up, teeming with young people in jeans clutching BlackBerrys as they walk through the halls. Yet in Democratic circles, another, potentially less welcome, parallel is being made: to the tight-knit and tight-lipped organization eight years ago of George W. Bush.

Decisions are guarded with extreme secrecy, none more so than the upcoming vice presidential selection, and that has occasionally irked members of Congress. In recent days, as Republicans publicly accused Sen. Barack Obama of appearing presumptuous during his presidential-style trip to Europe, Democrats privately expressed concerns that Obama has become too Chicago-centric, relying on his inner circle rather than a broader group that encourages input from Washington and elsewhere.

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Until recently, there were almost no women in senior leadership inside the campaign. That changed with the end of the primaries: Anita Dunn came on as a senior adviser in the spring; and Stephanie Cutter, a former operative for Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), arrived as chief of staff to Michelle Obama as the race entered general-election mode.

Patti Solis Doyle, ousted as the Clinton campaign manager earlier this year, has an office near Cutter. Sarah Hurwitz, until recently a speechwriter for Clinton, has moved into a small office space with Obama veterans Jon Favreau, Ben Rhodes and Adam Frankel.

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All were given the “no drama” speech before they were hired. “There are a whole series of games candidates play,” said Dan Pfeiffer, an Obama veteran who was recently promoted to communications director. Obama, he said, “brooks none of that” and has “specifically sought out people who are going to play by those rules.”

The hiring of Solis Doyle caused a distraction of the sort the Obama office is unaccustomed to: It was interpreted as a slap by Clinton, who had cut ties with her during the campaign, and it outraged some prominent women whom Obama hoped to win over in the general election. (The feelings still run hard: Clinton supporters have nicknamed her “Solis Disloyal.”)

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Pfeiffer took exception to the comparison to the 2000 Bush campaign, which was located in Austin and was driven by Karl Rove, Karen Hughes and Joe Allbaugh. Those three Bush devotees devised their own game plan, kept iron discipline and largely rejected advice from Washington. Still, Pfeiffer made no apologies for his own airtight shop.

“I don’t know that we’d get T-shirts made that say it, but we take pride in not leaking, we take pride in not being a typical campaign,” Pfeiffer said. The difference between the Obama discipline and the kind that Bush loyalists displayed in 2000, he said, is that “when all the layers got peeled back, they were actually leaking” and did not really get along — Rove and Hughes, most notably, ended their terms in Washington barely on speaking terms. When it came to discipline, Pfeiffer said, “they were just being tactical about it.”

While that approach appears to have served Obama well, it grates on some members of the party, particularly those in Congress, who were not with him from the outset.

Some Democrats on Capitol Hill have complained that he is not inclusive enough. They gripe that he is running his own campaign in some states, rather than the traditional coordinated effort; that he is not focusing on working-class white voters as he had promised at the end of the primaries; and that he has taken sides in some House primaries.

To quell dissent, David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, went to Capitol Hill last month to give lawmakers a political briefing. Obama also met with House members last week. But several Democratic officials reported a persistent undercurrent of tension, which they attributed in part to the cloistered atmosphere of the Chicago team.

“There is a feeling now that ‘we’re going to win this thing,’ and people are starting to talk about who is going to be what a few months from now,” said one Democratic adviser, who is working closely with the Obama campaign but is not on staff. “The small-team atmosphere has changed, and that has caused some frictions on the inside.”

KIGALI, Rwanda, Aug. 2 — There will be no Clinton restoration — not this year, at least. But the rehabilitation of Bill Clinton has begun.

The former president in many ways ended the Democratic primary campaign more isolated than his wife, with his own friends and allies unhappy with his flashes of anger and ill-chosen words and blaming him in part for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s defeat. With a negligible relationship with Sen. Barack Obama — he has spoken to him just once since the primaries — Clinton has been shut out of the Obama campaign almost entirely and does not know even basic things, such as the role he will play at the Democratic convention.

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Clinton said that even if Obama wins, people who voted for him will still have immense work to do.

“What we Democrats can’t afford to do, even as we support Senator Obama, is try to build one America on the cheap,” Clinton said, explaining that people could not tell themselves, ” ‘I voted across the racial divide; I have no obligations to do something in my community or around the world.’ In other words, if he wins . . . we’ve still got a lot of problems. We’ve got to heave-to here. We’ve got to show up.”

Asked his view of Obama’s high-profile overseas trip, Clinton said it could wind up helping him in the long term if not right away. “I think that the benefit Senator Obama may get out of that trip may come later in the course of this campaign in ways that aren’t as obvious as having however many people — 200,000 people or however many people — showed up in Berlin.”

Obama might be helped, Clinton said, “in some debate when he can say, ‘You know, a captain I met in Iraq said this to me,’ or, ‘I observed this in Afghanistan’ — and I don’t mean in a phony, showy way. I mean you want your president to have a feel for this. . . . It’s like everything else. You just learn it. You absorb it, so every time you do it, your comfort level goes up.”

Clinton said it is an open question whether Obama’s big events overseas ultimately helped or hurt politically. But, he said: “He should not be either discouraged or encouraged by the reaction of that trip. He should internalize it. It should be a thing that had merit for him in and of itself. And the fact that it had very little political impact in the short run should be of no concern to anybody. Most voters don’t have the space for it right now.”

PUMAs = Netroots 2.0!!!