The Note: The Fun Part

Nov. 7, 2008— -- Congratulations, Mr. President-Elect. You're the proud owner of one national economy. It's huge, lumbering, ornery, quite old, and sometimes unstable. It's on a special diet now -- but the doctors can't be sure if it will help.

Your constituents are beginning to hate it, but they really want to love it again. If they're going to love you, it's going to start here.

He's not technically president until Jan. 20. But the Obama presidency really starts Friday, when Sen. Barack Obama begins to take ownership of the issue that did so much to get him elected.

He and Sen. Joe Biden are huddling with their economic team in Chicago -- the group charged with turning things around (maybe one of whom will be the new Treasury secretary) -- and then the president-elect holds his first press conference since the election, at 2:30 pm ET.

With auto leaders on the Hill asking for their own bailout, talk of a new stimulus package even before President Bush joins the ranks of the unemployed, and new (dismal) jobs numbers coming Friday, a nation jittery from watching the Dow is looking for presidential leadership.

And now comes the first real acknowledgement that all of this -- everything voters poured into this vessel called Barack Obama on Tuesday -- takes time and patience. Be careful what you wish for -- and that goes both ways.

"In responding, Mr. Obama must strike a delicate balance between cooperating with an unpopular president whose policies he campaigned to change, and the inclination to wait until he takes charge in two and a half months to prescribe his own remedies," Jeff Zeleny and Jackie Calmes write in The New York Times. "No incoming president in modern times has been so pressured to begin governing, in effect, before he is sworn into office."

Just like he imagined it would be? "The new president will probably spend his first year in office careering from crisis to crisis, throwing lifelines to hard-hit households, local governments, industries and developing countries. The job will feel a lot less like that of a ship's captain and a lot more like that of a triage nurse," Steven Pearlstein writes in his Washington Post column. "He will need to make clear that though he intends to pursue the broad agenda he laid out during the campaign, the timing and details -- many of which were laid out more than a year ago -- may need to be adjusted in light of dramatically changed circumstances."

Yes, the nation wants a president again -- but don't forget that this one is still a senator for another two months.

"Obama is expected to lead a discussion about the nation's troubling job losses and possible remedies. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) has expressed support for passing a stimulus package in a lame-duck session of Congress. Obama's team does not appear to have reached consensus on that approach," the Los Angeles Times' Peter Nicholas and Michael Finnegan write.

"One Obama advisor, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that it may be preferable to wait until the new president is sworn in before passing a stimulus package. 'Wait until the new president and the new team can put together a package that becomes a down payment on a broader investment agenda,' the advisor said. 'That would be my preference.' "

Obama's first dance with Congress could come before the Inaugural Ball: "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for a two-stage effort to boost the shaky U.S. economy: a $60 billion-to-$100 billion stimulus package this month, followed early next year by a companion measure that would include a 'permanent tax cut,' " Greg Hitt and Jonathan Weisman write in The Wall Street Journal.

Said Pelosi: "The economy needs something sooner [than next year]. . . . Let's see if we can't do something, working together now, that gives us a two-month jump."

Nothing like expectations: "Economists said Friday's meeting of the Obama financial team could help bolster confidence that the president-elect will move quickly to shore up the struggling economy," USA Today's Kathy Kiely and Martha T. Moore report. "The stock market plummeted more than 400 points on both Wednesday and Thursday. The number of people drawing unemployment benefits hit a 25-year high, the Labor Department reported Thursday."

Bold-faced names are here to help: "On Friday, Obama is expected to meet with his 'transition economic advisory board,' which includes business leaders like Warren Buffett, Richard Parsons, Time Warner's board chairman, Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, and political leaders such as Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm," ABC's Jake Tapper reports.

Also at the meeting: Larry Summers, Paul Volcker, Robert Reich, Robert Rubin, David Bonior, William Donaldson, Roger Ferguson, William Daley, Penny Pritzker, and Antonio Villaraigosa.

How to lead? "Can Mr. Obama claim a mandate? The answer: a firm no-yes. This was not 1980, with a landslide 10-point, 44-state win and the will of a clear majority firmly revealed. And yet of course it's a mandate -- a clean win, a new beginning, a solid Democratic victory in the House and Senate," Peggy Noonan writes in her Wall Street Journal column. "Mr. Obama won it the old-fashioned way: he earned it. He confounded history to get it. And because he replaces a president whose unpopularity has impeded his ability to govern, he is, in a way, president from day one."

Think big, says Paul Krugman: "A serious progressive agenda -- call it a new New Deal -- isn't just economically possible, it's exactly what the economy needs," Krugman writes in his New York Times column. "The bottom line, then, is that Barack Obama shouldn't listen to the people trying to scare him into being a do-nothing president. He has the political mandate; he has good economics on his side. You might say that the only thing he has to fear is fear itself."

How not to make friends in Washington: "Obama needs to pump serious cash into the economy in a way that promotes his long-term priorities. That means billions for energy-efficient and climate-friendly infrastructure like wind turbines, solar panels and mass transit, but nothing for new sprawl roads that ravage nature and promote gas-guzzling," Michael Grunwald reports in Time. "Mostly, it means revamping Washington's dysfunctional method of selecting and funding infrastructure projects."

Then there's the real real world: "President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has congratulated President-elect Barack Obama on his victory, the first time since Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution that an Iranian leader has offered such wishes to an American counterpart," Thomas Erdbrink writes in The Washington Post. "The Iranian government's reaction to Obama's victory is intended to show interest in direct negotiations, said Mohammad Marandi, head of the Institute for North American and European Studies in Tehran."