America's challenges 2011: the Gulf oil spill has dominated the headlines for months, but President Obama still has plenty of other issues, from unemployment to Afghanistan, to deal with in the year ahead.

• Author: Sanger, David E.
• Position: Cover story

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When that giant oil gusher erupted in the Gulf of Mexico in April, it did more than foul the waters and threaten the lives of endangered pelicans: It also threw a wrench into the agenda of America's still-new President, forcing the White House to deal with a crisis no one could have anticipated.

The Gulf crisis soaked up time and public attention that President Obama had hoped to use to confront other urgent challenges as the November midterm elections approach: finding ways to jump-start the creation of jobs and keep the economy from slipping back toward recession; responding to nuclear-weapons threats from Iran and North Korea; reassessing U.S. strategy in Afghanistan; and what may be the most critical long-term issue in the President's inbox, dealing with a rising China.

Can't Presidents do more than one thing at a time? Of course: Every President spends his days juggling many issues, both domestic and foreign. But when a disaster like the Gulf oil spill strikes, the public and the media tend to focus on that single issue. And fairly or unfairly, the President gets judged by how quickly he responds, whether he seems to be in command, and the confidence his leadership instills--even if, as Obama said after the oil spill, "I can't suck it up with a straw."

If he appears to come up short, it can change the entire "narrative" of a presidency--a storyline that can, over time, come to color everything else that a President has to deal with.

"I think we coped with the disaster quickly and decisively," said David Axelrod, the President's top political adviser, as the spill was at its height. "But I'm not so sure we communicated what we were doing so well."

He could have been talking about the whole Obama presidency, which after a year and a half can boast some significant accomplishments--including passage of a major health-care reform law and preventing the Great Recession from turning into a Great Depression--but has nevertheless left the country deeply uneasy about what lies ahead.

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Staying Out of Textbooks

No one thought this would be an easy presidency, regardless of who succeeded George W. Bush in 2009. President Obama arguably came into office with a bigger set of problems than any President since Franklin D. Roosevelt took the oath in 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression. And by most accounts, Obama's actions kept one of the most severe recessions in history from becoming something much worse.

Obama's chief economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, says Obama's goal has been to "keep this economic crisis from ever being taught in high school economics classes"--that is, to keep it insignificant enough that, in contrast to the Depression, it wouldn't even rate a mention in textbooks.

By the Summers test, Obama has succeeded. But the judgment of history can often be different from the judgment of...