Barack Obama is expected to hit the ground running when he takes office on January 20th, but he faces unfeasibly high expectations that could stretch his political capital to the limit, writes DENIS STAUNTON
AS BARACK OBAMA prepares to move into the White House on January 20th, he has received a flood of unsolicited advice, much of it from the most unlikely quarters. US vice-president Dick Cheney has suggested that the incoming president should retain the vastly expanded executive power seized by President George Bush, and the outgoing president's former political strategist, Karl Rove, has urged Obama to focus initially on organising his White House.
"Mr Obama is assembling a strong and intelligent team of people with muscular views and large personalities. Will the individual parts cohere into a well-functioning whole?" Rove asked in the Wall Street Journal.
"Things that sound good often work less well in reality. Having served in the White House for nearly seven years and carefully studied how the modern presidency functions, it strikes me that some of Mr Obama's steps may make smooth operations harder. There are many things more interesting to the press than how the White House is organised, but few things matter as much, as every president will attest."
Dozens of Washington think-tanks and single-issue pressure groups have prepared manifestos for the new administration and presidential historians are lining up on television to urge Obama to model himself on Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan.
For his part, the president-elect has moved swiftly to assemble his cabinet, holding five press conferences during a single week in December to announce the latest additions to his team. Obama's choices have received generally good reviews from the political establishment, although his more progressive supporters are disappointed by the preponderance of old centrists from the Clinton era.
When asked how these 1990s political retreads represented change, Obama insisted that he was himself the embodiment of the change his campaign promised and that he had chosen the most experienced and competent hands to make his vision a reality.
"Understand where the vision for change comes from, first and foremost," he said.
"It comes from me. That's my job, to provide a vision in terms of where we are going, and to make sure, then, that my team is implementing."
The conventional wisdom in Washington is that a new president can waste no time in making his mark and expectations for Obama's first 100 days are formidable. According to the standard theory, a new president has a reservoir of political capital that is quickly depleted unless he uses it to introduce bold measures.
Presidencies seldom unfold according to plan, however, as Bush - who had promised a more modest foreign policy - discovered on September 11th, 2001. The day after he was re-elected in 2004, the president declared: "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it."
Bush promised a host of radical measures in his second term, including the privatisation of social security (the federal old-age pension system) and a major overhaul of the tax system.
Instead, his administration sunk into a morass of scandal, incompetence and unpopularity that led to the loss of the Republican majority in Congress in 2006.
Obama will almost certainly take a number of important steps within days of taking office, including the closure of the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, the unveiling of a plan to withdraw most US troops from Iraq and the launch of a massive public-investment programme to stimulate the economy.
If he is to be the transformative president many of his supporters are hoping for, however, Obama may have to show the patience and calm deliberation that characterised his election campaign. The new president will have an advantage enjoyed by few of his Democratic predecessors - comfortable majorities in both houses of Congress - and the economic crisis has created a popular appetite for centre-left policies.
Obama's bigger ambitions, however, such as health-care reform and the reshaping of American foreign policy, cannot be realised within the first few months of his presidency. As he acknowledged on election night, much of what he wants to achieve could take more than one term in office and will require the support of Republicans as well as Democrats.
ON THE DOMESTIC front, Obama has made clear that his overriding priority is preventing the recession that has gripped the US from deteriorating into a slump.
Despite a campaign promise to impose fiscal discipline, he is preparing to ignore the ballooning federal deficit while he pumps hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy to create jobs, encourage consumer spending and to keep troubled mortgage-payers in their homes.
The new administration will improve environmental standards and promote alternative, renewable energy sources as a first step towards reducing US dependence on imported oil.
Obama is more enthusiastic than his predecessor about a new global deal to combat global warming and he has promised to present a new face of the US to the world.
The new national security team, led by Hillary Clinton at the state department, Bush administration carry-over Bob Gates at the Pentagon, and former marine general Jim Jones as national security adviser, is dominated by foreign-policy realists.
The international community will be relieved to be rid of the ideologues who shaped foreign policy during many of the Bush years but some US allies are sceptical about the change Obama promises.
As chairman of a senate sub-committee on US relations with the EU, Obama failed to hold a single hearing and his expressions of support for the UN have lacked substance. He has promised to engage early in a serious effort to broker peace between the Israelis and Palestinians but has shown no sign of departing from Washington's almost unquestioning support for Israel in the conflict.
Obama has pledged to talk directly to the US's adversaries, including the leaders of Iran, Venezuela and Cuba, but he is committed to expanding the size of the US military and to doubling down on the war in Afghanistan.
On Russia, the new administration's tone is increasingly hawkish and the US is unlikely to drop its support for expanding Nato to include Georgia and Ukraine, a proposal Moscow perceives as a threat to its national security.
WITH UP TO FOUR MILLION people expected to gather in Washington for his inauguration, the new president will be sworn in with a powerful wave of popular goodwill behind him. Terry Sullivan, an expert on presidential transitions at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, told the National Journalrecently that Obama has prepared well for office but urged him to come clean to the American people about the challenge he faces in living up to their expectations.
"That's not some kind of cynical way of lowering expectations; it's a reality, and Americans need to be prepared for it. And in a sense it's the kind of straight talk that Americans actually appreciate from their leaders," Sullivan said.
"So I think there's going to be some things where he has an opportunity to accomplish a great deal; he has an opportunity to fail on an extraordinary stage. You know, that's why these guys do this. You can't be a chapter in a history book unless you face these extraordinary opportunities and do your best to accomplish [them] and then you let the chips fall where they may."