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Challenges for the president-elect

Harun ur Rashid
***Obama has made history by winning power. As he attempts to make history in the way he exercises it, he will be weighed down by high expectations. In the Kenyan language "Barack" means "blessed." He is going to need all the many giftsand all the luckto meet the huge challenges.***
STANDING before 250,000 fans at the Grant Park, Chicago on November 4, when the sweet scent of victory was fresh in his nostrils, president-elect Barrack Obama, in his victory speech, underscored that it was important that everybody understood that the promises he has made during the campaign could not be fulfilled overnight. There has to be a realistic expectation of what can happen and how quickly.
He said: “We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America! have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise youwe as a people will get there.”
On January 20, when he sits in the Oval Office of the White House, he will face the reality: the most difficult economic climate for an incoming president since Franklin D. Roosevelt, and foreign policy and environmental issues.
Economic
He faces three key economic challenges:
• Ensuring the stability of the financial system.
• Dealing with the looming recession.
• Pay for his ambitious plans in health, education and environment Unemployment rose to its highest level
for 14 years; the crumbling powerhouses of Ford, Chrysler and General Motors produced more terrible figures; and consumer sales, in the words of one analyst, fell off a cliff.
The car industry published a study very recently forecasting that the failure of any one of the big three (General Motors, Ford and Chrysler) would throw 2.5 million people out of work. In the ten months of this recession about 750,000 people have lost their jobs.
The Economic Cycle Research Institute in New York painted a bleak picture of the US economy in these words: "The leading indicators are showing no light at the end of this tunnel. In the last week of October, they registered their worst readings in the six decades of history. It tellsyou the economy is not just down, it is plunging. There is no end in sight to this recession."
Obama has promised a tax cut to 95% of Americans, and plenty of other things that will cost money toolike better access to health care for the 45 million people without insurance, and an army of new teachers, with improved salaries, for the school system.
None of that will be cheapand Mr Obama is inheriting a budget deficit running into hundreds of billions a year and a national debt, which is about to go above the Sil
trillion mark.
And then there is the long-term budget challenge, the future gap between revenues and spending for the two biggest government programs, social security and Medicare (which provide pensions and medical care for older people) as the babyboomergenerationretires.
These programs are likely to turn from surplus to deficit by the end of the Obama presidency, and have proved very difficult to fix politically. The growing cost of medical care, in fact, threatens to derail government spending both in the longterm and the short term.
All in all, how Obama responds to the formidable set of economic challenges could well determine how he is remembered in history, either as an FDR who changed the US political landscape for a generation, or as a Jimmy Carter, whose failure to tackle the economic challenges of the 1970s led to a one-term presidency and the election of Republican Ronald Reagan.
Foreign policy
Obama will find himself tested and perhaps defined by foreign policy issues just as his predecessor was. He has to find an exit strategy for Iraq that does not somehow enhance the regional power status of Iran.
And, of course, the issue of Iranian nuclear ambition cannot be ignored either. How will President Obama react to pressure from Israel, or from his own military commanders, to bomb Iran's reactor to prevent it from developing a bomb? We might know very soon.
In Afghanistan, Obama has talked of putting in more American troops and finishing the fight with al-Qaeda. That is easier said than done, and if a beefed-up Afghan campaign goes badly it will reflect on his judgment and damage his standing.
There remain the challenges of fighting effectively around the Pakistani border without alienating that turbulent ally. And that is before the problems of rebuildingor rather buildingAfghan civil society are contemplated.
He has to repair relations with Russia, involve his administration in peaceful settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Kashmir dispute, and assure China dial America is not a strategic competitor but a strategic partner without impairing relations with Japan and South Korea.
He has to restore good relations with many of the Latin American countries that have strained relations with the Bush administration. With regard to Cuba, will he lift sanctions from the country?
Environment
Obama has said that he will eliminate the dependence on oil from the Middle East and Venezuela within lOyears.Hehasalsoprom-ised to establish a national low carbon fuel standard, provide incentives for renewable resources of energy, and manufacture one million plug-in hybrid cars by 2015.
He has talked about a “use it or lose it" approach to existing gas and oil leases, and about promoting responsible domestic production of oil and natural gas.
Fulfilling these promises will be a daunting task, and he will be judged on the success of his environment-friendly policies.
Obama has made history by winning power. As he attempts to make history in the way he exercises it, he will be weighed down by high expectations. In the Kenyan language “Barack" means “blessed." He is going to need all the many giftsand all the luckto meet the huge challenges.
Hamster Harun ur Rashid is a former Bangladesh Ambassador to the UN. Geneva.