Great expectations: if Barack Obama meets the enormous challenges facing the nation, he could go down in history as one of America's great Presidents. But his success is far from assured at a time of crisis at home and threats abroad.

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

For more than two centuries, great crises have created the opportunity to forge great presidencies.

If the long-simmering Civil War had not broken out a month after his inauguration in 1861, Abraham Lincoln would not be known as the man who saved the Union from dissolution. If Franklin D. Roosevelt had been elected at a time of prosperity, rather than in the midst of the Great Depression in 1932, he would never have overseen the creation of the New Deal and left a legacy including the Social Security system and minimum standards of living for millions of Americans that we take for granted today.

But simply being elected at a time of crisis is far from a guarantee of success, as Barack Obama well knows.

Obama faces some of the greatest challenges in modern American history as he becomes the 44th President of the United States. As soon as the inaugural balls are over, Obama will enter the Oval Office and have to deal with a number of crises, at home and abroad, as daunting as any since FDR was sworn in.

Like Roosevelt, Obama ran on the theme that the country was broken--and that radical change would be needed to set it back on the right course. George W. Bush leaves office with lower approval ratings than any President since modern polling began--even lower than Richard Nixon in 1974, before he was forced to resign during the Watergate scandal. Today, more than 70 percent of Americans approve of Obama's leadership since his election. But how long the goodwill lasts depends on how quickly, and how well, he handles a wide range of crises.

JOB 1: THE ECONOMY

In fact, those crises began to swirl around Obama even as he was assembling his Cabinet and preparing to take office. Unemployment is rising--nowhere close to the 25 percent that crippled the country during the Depression, but in the first year of Obama's presidency, nearly 10 percent of the workforce could be jobless. In November alone, a record 533,000 people lost their jobs.

The American car industry is in a state of collapse (see p. 16). Washington has scrambled to save two of Detroit's Big Three--General Motors and Chrysler--from bankruptcy, fearing that their collapse could deliver a knockout punch to an economy that is already reeling. Detroit's woes came on the heels of this fall's financial industry bailout, in which the federal government spent more than a trillion dollars rescuing banks, propping up Wall Street investment firms, and trying to slow the home foreclosures at the root of the turmoil.

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Ironically, finding a pathway out of Iraq, which last year looked to be one of the biggest challenges facing the new President, may turn out to be one of Obama's less urgent tasks. In November, President Bush signed an agreement with the Iraqi government that requires most...