Staggering to-do list awaits next president
WASHINGTON -- Why exactly would anybody want this job?
The candidate who wins the White House on Nov. 4 will face the most calamitous economy for any new president since Franklin Roosevelt took over amid the Depression in 1933. He'll assume command of the biggest wartime deployment of U.S. troops since Richard Nixon was sworn in during the Vietnam War in 1969.
Their campaign promises — Republican John McCain's crusade against budget earmarks, for instance, and Democrat Barack Obama's commitment to expand health care coverage — almost certainly will take a back seat at the start. They'll be forced to turn to negotiating a new regulatory structure for financial institutions, rebuilding stock and housing markets, dealing with the partial nationalization of banks unveiled Tuesday and preventing an economic downturn from sliding into something worse.
Also on the immediate agenda: managing the reduction of U.S. troops in Iraq without sacrificing hard-won security gains, and stemming a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan.
"Walking into the Oval Office is tough enough when you're facing kind of the ordinary challenges that face any president," says Leon Panetta, a former California congressman and White House chief of staff for President Clinton. "But whoever is elected president this time is going to face a set of crises that no president has had to face in modern times."
The public agrees: 44% in a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday say the new president will face the most serious challenges of anyone in his position over the last 50 years. Just 14% call the problems no worse than usual.
Representatives of both candidates are scheduled to sit down today for the first time with the Bush administration's "transition council" to begin planning the takeover of the government by one or the other. The FBI already has launched background investigations of dozens of aides to McCain and Obama so that some members of the president-elect's team will have security clearances in place the morning after the Nov. 4 election.
Whatever work is being done behind the scenes, though, neither candidate has done much to prepare the public for the tough choices and long haul ahead — an issue they may be pressed to address during their third and final debate tonight at Hofstra University on Long Island. The 90-minute forum, moderated by CBS' Bob Schieffer, is scheduled to be televised on the major TV networks at 9 p.m. ET.
At their previous debates, neither was willing to specify a single significant campaign promise that was likely to be postponed or abandoned because of the demands of responding to the economy's meltdown.
Most of those surveyed predict that the candidate they support would be able to make the economy grow within two years of taking office.
Hopes are particularly high for Obama. Half of his backers say he'll be able to set the nation on the right course within two years, and 60% predict he will have withdrawn most U.S. combat troops from Iraq by then.
