Next president will inherit huge challenges but may leave behind grand legacy
11:32 PM CDT on Saturday, November 1, 2008
By TODD J. GILLMAN / The Dallas Morning News
tgillman@dallasnews.com
dallasnews.com
WASHINGTION – The race for the White House has come down to this: a final sprint toward a prize that doesn't seem like such a prize anymore.
The $10 trillion national debt that Barack Obama or John McCain will inherit is only the tip of the iceberg.
The next president will wrestle with volatile markets, faltering consumer confidence, spreading unemployment – the worst economic climate since Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933. He'll also have to cope with two wars, a strained military, frayed alliances and an emboldened Russia.
Even after surviving two years on the stump and shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars on consultants, attack ads and charter flights, who would want this job?
"There's no president in recent history that's had so many crises to deal with. ... This president's going to have his hands full," said Leon Panetta, chief of staff to the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton. "The one good thing about the next presidency is, there's no place to go but up."
The knottiest problems come in many flavors.
There are long-term, costly and politically tricky problems like climate change. Or Medicare, which went into deficit this year, triggering a 5-year-old law that will require the president to tell Congress how he wants to stabilize the trust fund. Long-term, the health program for seniors could consume trillions of dollars more if it isn't changed.
There are urgent, already identified problems: wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the fight against terrorists, the banking crisis, the volatile stock market, rising unemployment, shrinking economic output, shrunken U.S. influence and growing anti-Americanism abroad.
There are chronic problems both candidates avoided, like illegal immigration, and those they did address that have no easy solution, such as heath care.
And there are the unknown unknowns – the bolt-from-the-blue crises that test a new president's mettle, as Mr. Obama's running mate, Joe Biden, predicted.
"They're going to have to deal with it simultaneously. I don't think they really have an option," said George Edwards, chairman of presidential studies at Texas A&M University's Bush School of Government and Public Service and editor of Presidential Studies Quarterly.
Over the 77-day transition between Election Day and the Jan. 20 inauguration, the president-elect will be under tremendous pressure to name a national security team and a Treasury secretary.
A Democratic winner would face a more delicate transition, working with a lame duck Republican administration for which Mr. Obama has shown little regard. But if Mr. McCain wins, he'll almost certainly face a Democratic Congress – with many lawmakers shocked and angry over an Obama loss.
But a landslide could give Mr. Obama a freer hand than recent presidents have enjoyed.
"That's a problem that we'll just have to cope with," senior Obama strategist David Axelrod joked Saturday during a Nevada campaign stop. He said, though, that collecting the 270 electoral votes needed to win Tuesday is "job 1."
"To the extent you can do better than that, it's helpful," Mr. Axelrod said. "We've been very divided as a country and it's impeded our ability to solve problems."
'A lot of problems'
Within a few weeks of taking office, the new president will submit a budget proposal to Congress, posing another early legislative test. By some estimates, the 2009 deficit could hit nearly $1 trillion, a bigger bite of national economic output than at any time since World War II.
On the international front, both nominees would work on knitting alliances weakened under President Bush, though it's hard to imagine how a new chief executive will juggle the time-consuming task of face-to-face diplomacy with the all-consuming demands of a reeling economy.
"You got a lot of problems," said John Sununu, who served as chief of staff to the first President Bush. "You've got to deal with all of them."
Both nominees have been "disingenuous" in refusing to identify promises they would defer, Dr. Edwards said.
And both have quietly begun planning to run the country so they hit the ground running if they win.
Former crises
Other new presidents have faced crises.
Harry Truman took over during World War II, Abraham Lincoln with civil war looming. Gerald Ford ascended amid Watergate.
But for clues to how White House newcomers cope with dire straits, historians often point to Roosevelt, who took office in a country in the throes of the Great Depression.
It wasn't until World War II that the breadlines disappeared. Yet FDR stayed popular. He had inherited the situation, and the New Deal showed he was intent on finding solutions.
"A lot depends on people's perceptions of whether you're doing the best that can be done under the circumstances," Dr. Edwards said. "Things are not nearly as bad now as they were then. Not close. But a lot of people are suffering, a lot of people are scared."
Either way, a record-busting deficit would almost certainly trim the new president's sails.
"There probably are a number of issues that have to go on the back burner," Mr. Panetta said, including marquee issues like health care reform.
Moderate Democrats like Rep. Henry Cuellar of Laredo worry that Mr. Obama would be tugged leftward – ensuring voter backlash in the next elections. "We can't steer far left or go to the extreme," he argued.
Still, for either candidate, this may be a chance at presidential greatness.
"Presidents, by nature, they want the biggest job in the world," said Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley. "You get remembered for doing big things, not for micromanaging. ... You have the opportunity to be this political savior."
He noted that Lyndon Johnson's 1964 landslide gave him the chance to enact the most sweeping legislation in decades, the Great Society: Medicare, landmark civil-rights laws and more.
"It's a time for boldness, and not temerity," Dr. Brinkley said.
There's little doubt that even in a time of turmoil, both Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain yearn for the job. As Mr. Obama told Comedy Central's Jon Stewart last week: "Now is the time when you can have an impact." |
