2 Years After Campaign Began, a Different World

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2 Years After Campaign Began, a Different World

When Barack Obama declared himself a candidate for president, the Dow was climbing and the “surge” in Iraq was just starting.

By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: January 17, 2009


WASHINGTON — The world looked very different on the frigid Saturday in February 2007 when Barack Obama stood in front of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Ill., and declared himself a candidate for president of the United States.

The “surge” in Iraq was in its first weeks, and it seemed hard to imagine that by the time the next president took office, in 710 days, there would be a consensus about the pace of an American withdrawal. The two Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, were talking about a peaceful power-sharing agreement.

The Dow was at 12,580, on the way to 14,000 that summer. General Motors was making money selling cars even while reporting some concerns about “nonprime mortgages” held by its financing division. And the greatest worries about China and India were that their economies were growing so fast they could overheat.

The challenges that Mr. Obama will begin to confront on Tuesday afternoon, in short, bear only a passing resemblance to those on the table on the day two years ago when he conceded that “there is a certain presumptuousness in this — a certain audacity — to this announcement.”

The agenda he is setting out to enact now is significantly altered from what he had in mind then, partly by choice but mostly by circumstance. Over the past two years, and especially in the two and a half months since his election, he has spoken less and less about Iraq and more and more about stabilizing the world economy. Behind the scenes, his national staff has raced to reassess strategies for Afghanistan, Gaza, Iran and Pakistan, even before logging on to their secure computers in the West Wing.

“He’s facing the classic problem of having to handle a number of crises before he’s really got time to set out a long-term architecture,” G. John Ikenberry, a Princeton professor who co-wrote a detailed study of the national security agenda for whoever became the next president. Former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright recently called Mr. Obama’s task analogous to “redesigning the airplane while you’re flying it.”

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/us/politics/18change.html?_r=1&hp