ShareThisMuch of America's current psyche has become intertwined with Barack Obama and the promise of his presidency. But the potential for disappointment is immense.
Americans can be impatient. The Obama administration has little time to act on its unprecedented agenda of rescuing the economy, protecting the environment, reforming health care and restoring the country's respected place in the world.
Fair or unfair, the first 100 days could define this presidency.
"He is being given the opportunity to be a Franklin Delano Roosevelt," believes Alan Dershowitz, lawyer to celebrities and theorist on civil rights, who watched in wonder from his perch at Harvard as Obama became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.
"He's getting a real honeymoon from the American people. But that won't last long."
Amartya Sen, the Nobel laureate in economics and wise man of both Harvard and Cambridge, has seen nothing like it.
Americans' desire to repudiate their initial support for the war in Iraq, their respect for Obama's obvious intelligence and their longing to turn the page on their painful history of racism: "All these play a part in turning an exceptional human being into almost the kind of godhead that he has become," Sen said.
But in the midst of this adulation, what was once a recession threatens to disintegrate into permanent decline, wars plague the Middle East, the population ages, services deteriorate and the planet warms.
The incoming administration is navigating an economic stimulus package through Congress that will probably top $1 trillion in an effort to heal the recession while also tackling any number of social deficits, while adding greatly to the real one.
Sen believes that the first goal of the stimulus package must be to restore a sense of confidence among Americans. "And that will depend on how much in command Obama looks and his economic team looks," he said.
Along with tax cuts and infrastructure spending, the Obama stimulus package seeks to foment a revolution in energy production and security, while simultaneously tackling global warming.
For Dershowitz, the "the first symbol will be closing Guantanamo. And it will only be a symbol."
The incoming administration is struggling with the complex problem of how to handle those inmates of the offshore prison who pose a danger to national security, but who could not be convicted in a court of law because the evidence against them was obtained by torture.
How is Obama to deal with such an intractable issue as he seeks to restore his country's global reputation?
"Openly, openly," Dershowitz urged. "Acknowledge the problem and deal with it openly." Beyond that, no one knows exactly what to do.
But the success or failure of this administration will not rest on individual policy decisions, whether in national security, energy or even the economy.
The most important duty of a president in a time of crisis is not to craft legislation or negotiate treaties. It is to instil confidence -- not just in the economy, but in the future prospects of society itself. Ronald Reagan succeeded as president because he convinced Americans that cutting taxes, deregulating the economy and confronting the Soviet Union would reverse the country's perceived decline.
It wasn't just that the policies worked. It was that Reagan made people believe in him and in his policies, and so his policies worked.
Obama's defining challenge is to justify the longings and aspirations of those who believe in him and those who don't, but want to.
The novelist and former prosecutor Scott Turow, who has known Obama since the early 1990s, expects to see his friend falter in the first days. "Despite my enormous personal fondness for the president-elect ... at the beginning of virtually every enterprise I have seen him in, it has taken a while for him to get his legs," he observed.
Turow watched Obama struggled to grasp the political culture in the Illinois capital, Springfield, when he first arrived there as state senator. He points to Obama's first, failed attempt to enter national politics by taking on popular congressman Bobby Rush.
"With all due respect to the president-elect, who is a remarkable man and a remarkable politician ... they're going to drop the ball somewhere."
But the first 100 days aren't what matters, Turow believes, because the president-elect's great gift, as a mutual friend once told Turow, is that "he has always filled the field that has opened before him.
"And that's the most encouraging thing. This man has always raised his game to the level of the challenge that's in front of him."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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