President Obama to face the burden of soaring expectations

Barack Obama is now the 44th president of the United States. To say he faces challenges may be the understatement of the century.

The Middle East remains a flash point. Iran is inching closer to producing a nuclear bomb. Russia continues to flex its muscles and threatens to ignite a new Cold War. Iraq is healing but not yet out of the woods. Afghanistan is deteriorating significantly. Pakistan is near chaos internally and close to military conflict with India. North Korea is an enigma with a nuclear arsenal.

Economically, both the U.S. and the world are in crisis with no turnaround in sight.

The international financial system is upside down. Credit has been crippled and massive layoffs are hitting industries worldwide. Huge bailouts and massive amounts of “liquidity” have been pumped into financial systems with few positive results thus far.

No one knows how deep the problems go or how to fix them quickly.

Nations who in the past have financed the massive borrowing by our government (i.e., China and Saudi Arabia) have fewer resources to do so. Entitlement spending continues to soar and we are now looking at trillion dollar deficits far into the future.

Perhaps no incoming president has faced such a huge array of challenges as those that now greet President Obama.

But his biggest obstacle may not be among those listed above. It may very well be the soaring expectations the nation and the world have for him. Never has so much been expected of someone so quickly.

Our new president is concentrating on fashioning a stimulus package that will soften some of the economic blows we are enduring.

He will soon discover that Congress in general and his own party in particular will not be on the same page with him regarding some elements of that package. He will have one chance to get the stimulus right. He can’t easily come back for another trillion in new spending if the first trillion doesn’t work. And once he puts his stamp on the response to the crisis, it will be more difficult for him to blame the previous administration for the problem.

Beyond the headaches and challenges he faces, President Obama also has an opportunity to address some critical problems that have been lingering for decades.

He has acknowledged the fact that runaway entitlement spending has to be curbed if we are to have any long-term financial stability. It took Richard Nixon – the iconoclastic anti-communist – to open the doors to China. Had a Democrat tried it at the time, he would have been crucified.

In a similar vein, it will take a liberal to address the entitlement problem. Any conservative venturing down that path would be executed politically with charges of abandoning the poor and needy. President Obama clearly sees the handwriting on the wall regarding the explosion of entitlement spending. If he can develop a bipartisan approach that successfully addresses this critical problem, that in and of itself could make his presidency a success.

Yes, President Obama doesn’t have a large enough plate to hold all of the problems piling up on it. The critical nature of the economic and military challenges doesn’t afford him the luxury of spending a lot of time “studying” the problems. He is going to have to act and act quickly. I don’t envy him. He is going to need considerable skill and a lot of luck to make any headway with the problems besetting us.

May your horseshoe point upward, Mr. President. You are going to need all the luck and skill you can muster.