Looking to join Barack Obama's administration? Then you'll want to buy or browse a copy of "The United States Government Policy and Supporting Positions," better known as the Plum Book.

Published after every presidential election since the Eisenhower era, the Plum Book lists jobs in the executive and legislative branches being vacated in January. The 2008 edition, available from the Government Printing Office for $38 (paper edition) or free download, includes some 8,000 jobs in 209 pages.    

You might be looking for a high-powered position as general counsel of a cabinet agency, or perhaps a more workaday job like secretary for the American Battle Monuments Commission. Either way, you had better know somebody. A third of the jobs listed in the Plum Book are presidential appointments, destined for Obama loyalists and campaign supporters, and most of the others will be hard fought after as the Bush administration exits and Democrats retake control of the White House for the first time since 2000.

The 2008 Plum Book is about 1,000 jobs thicker than the 2004 edition, another sign of the bulging federal bureaucracy under Bush.