Mission impossible? Few presidents have faced the daunting challenges confronting Barack Obama when he took office, a first-term report card, and a look ahead.

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

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If you think your freshman year was tough, consider what President Obama has gone through during his first eight months in the White House.

A dizzying array of crises fell upon the President in his first months: from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression and the collapse of two of America's Big Three Carmakers at home, to a nuclear challenge from North Korea, the violent aftermath of a disputed election in Iran, and an effort to begin pulling the U.S. out of Iraq while immersing it more deeply than ever in Afghanistan.

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As if all that isn't enough, Obama has vowed to get serious about addressing climate change and reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil, not to mention reinventing health care so that virtually all Americans are covered by insurance, and overhauling an immigration system that his predecessor tried, and failed, to fix. Not only are these enormous goals, many of them are extraordinarily expensive-at a time when the U.S. is already deep in debt.

"I think one of the cautions that has to be given to the President," former Secretary of State Colin Powell told CNN, "is that you can't have so many things on the table that you can't absorb it all."

Trying to dispel the idea that he has bitten off too much (which even some of his Democratic allies believe), Obama said in June, "I have to repeat and revive an old saying we had from the campaign: 'Yes, we can.' "

'UNDOING THE DAMAGE'

But what sounds so neat on the campaign trail often turns out to be pretty messy once you are in the Oval Office. It seems like an age ago that Obama took the oath of office on a frigid day in January, chastising the country for "our collective failure to make hard choices" and our willingness to suspend national ideals "for expedience's sake."

That was a clear signal of Obama's determination to undo a range of policies--from the harsh interrogation of terror suspects and illegal domestic wiretapping, to the invasion o Iraq--that hurt America's image around the world.

But "undoing the damage"--the theme of this White House--is quite tricky, whether it's foreign affairs or repairing the nation's economy. And now that the new President is no longer so new, he can't afford to complain that every problem is one he inherited.

"When a President tries new policies to deal with old problems and then new policies appear to be failed policies, then he owns it," says George C. Edwards III, a presidential scholar at Texas A&M University. "That's the challenge for a President."

Obama's biggest success and...