Past, Present And Future

We are a different country now.

When millions of Americans went to the polls Nov. 4, we didn't know whether a black man could be elected president of the United States. Pundits and pollsters said Barack Obama was almost certain to win, but history and experience told us we couldn't be sure until it really happened.

Nov. 4 changed that, and more.

"If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible," the president-elect said that night, "... tonight is your answer."

The presidential election of 2008 wasn't a landslide, but it was surely an earthquake. Obama won a convincing 53 percent of the popular vote. It was not only black Americans who gave him that majority, it was a broad coalition from every demographic group.

But the greater test will come during the presidency that begins Jan. 20. Can Obama forge his one-time coalition of voters into a realignment that lasts a generation?

History has given him a difficult time to take the job. The deepest financial crisis in decades has blown a gaping hole in the federal budget, and that alone will constrain his choices. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will demand the new president's attention no matter what he wants to do.

For now, Obama has to manage a transition - and a huge amount of symbolism.

Los Angeles Times

Here's a sampling of what Obama faces:

BUSH'S LEGAL LEGACY

When Obama becomes president in January, he will confront the legal legacy of the Bush administration.

From expansive executive privilege to hard-line tactics in the war on terrorism, Obama must decide what he will undo and what he will embrace.

The stakes couldn't be higher.

On one hand, civil libertarians and other critics of the Bush administration may feel betrayed if Obama doesn't move aggressively to reverse legal policies they say have violated the Constitution and international law. On the other hand, Obama risks alienating some conservative Americans and some - but by no means all - military and intelligence officials if he seeks to hold officials accountable for those expansive policies.

Here are some of the legal issues confronting him:

•How does he close the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba? He has pledged to shutter it, but how quickly can he do so when it holds some detainees whom no administration would want to release?

•Obama has called coercive interrogation methods such as waterboarding unconstitutional and illegal, but will his Justice Department investigate or prosecute Bush administration officials who ordered or condoned such techniques?

•Will the new administration press to learn the full extent of the Bush administration's electronic eavesdropping and data-mining activities, and will it curtail or halt some of them?

•The Bush administration exerted tight control over the Justice Department by hiring more Republican-leaning political appointees and ousting those who were viewed as disloyal. Will Obama give the department more ideological independence?

McClatchy-Tribune

HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT

The Obama administration will soon inherit a $35 billion federal housing agency that was a weak backbencher during the housing crisis and moved too late to do much to keep millions of families from going into foreclosure.

Beyond the pressing crisis, the Department of Housing and Urban Development also has dramatically retreated in the past eight years from its mission of fostering affordable housing. Pushing homeownership has been the agency's top priority, and HUD's budget for public housing for low-income families has been cut year after year.

Experts on housing finance and poverty warn the president-elect's advisers that the long-neglected agency will require hefty amounts of taxpayer money, aggressive leadership and a culture shift.

HUD's work on the foreclosure crisis illustrates the challenges. The industry trend toward subprime loans is expected to cause an estimated 5.2 million homeowners to lose their properties in the next two years if lenders and the government do not act.

When Obama's team arrives at HUD, it also will find about 1,900 housing authorities nationwide clamoring for money and a $20 billion backlog of maintenance projects at public housing developments.

The Washington Post

ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

What does a community organizer from Chicago who spent four years in the Senate before being elected president know about spotted owls, endangered salmon, mountain bark beetles, Western water rights, old-growth forests and the maintenance backlog in the national parks?

Probably not much.

Obama has offered scattered clues as to where he stands on the most pressing public lands and endangered species issues.

In reading the tea leaves, however, environmental groups are optimistic, timber industry and land-rights groups are wary, and an influential lawmaker is excited about having an ally in the White House.

"This guy is a quick study, and I'm sure he will find competent people," said Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., who as chairman of the House Appropriations interior subcommittee oversees nearly $28 billion in annual funding for the Interior Department, the U.S. Forest Service and the Environmental Protection Agency.

"We will be able to work with him. Anything will be better than President Bush."

McClatchy-Tribune

HEALTH CARE

The nation's bleak economic environment paradoxically might spur the kind of costly, sweeping overhaul of the nation's health care system that has eluded policymakers for decades, many strategists, industry leaders and economists say.

Hospitals and physicians are increasingly worried about the escalating burden of unemployed workers being thrown onto the rolls of the uninsured.

Liberal advocacy groups see the Treasury Department's billions-of-dollars commitment to banks and other financial institutions bolstering the case for a similar investment to help sick Americans obtain medical care.

And businesses see new urgency in addressing the nation's health care crisis as they struggle to pay costs for medical benefits while sales plummet and profit margins shrivel.

Democrats generally agree on an approach that would allow most Americans to keep their current coverage while creating an exchange so people and businesses without coverage could link up with insurers.

Republican lawmakers are expressing concerns about proposals that would drive the federal budget deeper into the red. By some estimates, extending coverage to the nation's uninsured could cost more than $100 billion a year.

Obama has not indicated whether he would champion major health care legislation right away or if he would pursue a more incremental approach, as some lawmakers and analysts have counseled.

Los Angeles Times

FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION

The Obama administration will inherit a Food and Drug Administration widely seen as struggling to protect Americans from unsafe medication, contaminated food and a flood of questionable imports from China and other countries.

Shaken by a series of alarming failures, the FDA desperately needs an infusion of strong leadership, money, technology and personnel - and perhaps a major restructuring, say former officials, members of Congress, watchdog groups and government reports.

The FDA also has been one of the many federal agencies in which Bush administration critics say ideology has trumped science, citing the long delay in approving the over-the-counter sale of the Plan B contraceptive.

The Washington Post

THE CHINA CHALLENGE

As a dangerous confrontation flared between China and Taiwan in 1996, President Bill Clinton deployed the 7th Fleet to deter the two rivals from going to war. Five years later, when a U.S. spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter, Bush faced a prolonged international crisis. Meanwhile, human rights and democracy in China were a perennial hot-button issue.

It's Obama's turn to deal with the China challenge, and this time, it's all about the money. As the global financial system teeters, China - with its $1.9 trillion in foreign reserves and slowing but still strong economy - offers a potential lifeline.

The crisis that Obama is inheriting has pushed aside the old points of contention and underscored how profoundly the power equation between Washington and Beijing has changed.

China owns more than half-a-trillion dollars in U.S. government bonds, more than any other country, and Washington needs Beijing to continue buying them to help finance the national debt and the financial industry bailout.

Although China's economy is heavily dependent on exports to the United States, it is also a growing market for U.S. products, making trade retaliation - long a threat wielded solely by Washington - more of a two-way street.

During the campaign, Obama described China as "neither our enemy nor our friend; they're competitors." He called for broad cooperation with Beijing while repeating the accusation that the trade surplus was stoked by a Chinese currency kept artificially cheap.

China is a veto-holding permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, and there are many other reasons Washington needs Beijing's help.

Throw in the economy, and many expect Obama to take a mild approach toward Beijing on issues of human rights, freedom of speech and Tibet.

The Associated Press

NATIONAL SECURITY

It's called the President's Daily Brief, or, more informally, the "threat matrix." Obama began receiving daily intelligence reports immediately after the election.

Obama and his national security advisers likely will keep those reports in mind as they consider reforms to the current administration's counterterrorism policies. Already, civil liberties groups and others have compiled a "wish list" of sorts, seeking the repudiation of controversial tactics.

"This administration got a chance to make all its own rules," said Annemarie Brennan, advocacy director for international justice and domestic human rights at Amnesty International USA.

Now it's Obama's turn. Tempering Obama's desire to close the book on an administration that has been accused by critics of violating domestic and international law will be the need to ensure that the nation remains protected.

Confronting Obama is nothing less than a choice on whether to dismantle the legal framework that the Bush administration created in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Human rights and civil liberties groups are pushing the Obama administration to:

•Close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Before that happens, his administration must review the basis for holding each of the remaining 250 detainees.

•Dismantle the military commission process for trying accused terrorists and instead try them in U.S. federal courts.

•Issue an executive order that ends rendition - the practice of sending an alleged terrorist to another country to be held and questioned - and revokes a 2007 order that re-authorized the CIA's detention and interrogation program.

•Issue an order that a single standard be used in interrogating suspected terrorists.

•Scale back amendments passed this year to the federal law that governs the surveillance of foreign agents and which provided retroactive immunity from lawsuits to the nation's largest telecom companies.

•Conduct a formal review - even to the point of establishing an independent commission - of Bush administration legal policy and decisions made regarding interrogation and detention.

McClatchy-Tribune

RELATIONS WITH CUBA

As president, Obama may loosen the decades-old U.S. embargo against communist Cuba, but likely won't press Congress for major changes, analysts say.

Obama is expected to ease U.S. travel restrictions to Cuba and offer a new, less-confrontational tone with the possibility of greater contacts between Havana and Washington.

"I think there will be some small immediate changes that over time may lead to wider improvements," said Wayne Smith, who once headed the U.S. Interests Section in Havana and is now with the Washington-based Center for International Policy.

The thorny relations between the United States and its nearby neighbor in the Caribbean deteriorated under Bush, who tightened the embargo, cutting back the number of visits Cuban-Americans are allowed from once a year to once every three years, while also curtailing the amount of money exiles can send their Cuban relatives.

Obama is widely expected to meet his campaign promise to lift the restrictions on family travel and remittances. He also may expand "people-to-people" exchanges, a policy pushed by the Clinton administration that allowed American academics, church groups and students to visit Cuba with relative ease.

U.S. diplomats once conferred regularly with their Cuban counterparts on issues such as immigration and drug interdiction, but those talks withered during the Bush years. Analysts expect Obama will reopen them, and that Cubans likely will be willing.

Cox News Service

ISRAELIS AND PALESTINIANS

Prospects for peace between Israelis and Palestinians are all but on hold as both sides await cues next year from the new U.S. administration.

Obama has yet to signal how he would pursue a peace that may prove to be a linchpin in exit strategies from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama won't be able to ignore the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. American presidents since Jimmy Carter have played a role in negotiations during the past decades.

Here are key questions facing Obama and his foreign policy team:

•How involved and how soon?

Obama probably won't approach the Palestinian-Israeli issue until spring, after a new Israeli government is formed. Israeli voters will elect a new leader in February.

•Will Obama pursue negotiations under the framework established by the Bush administration and European and international partners that has yet to lead to a breakthrough?

At a recent meeting in Egypt, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators presented U.S. and international envoys with a set of agreements on how they plan to proceed next year in addressing key sticking points. The so-called Middle East Quartet - the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations - endorsed a plan to continue bilateral talks.

•Will Obama reach out to Hamas, the ruling faction in Gaza labeled a terrorist group by Israel and the United States?

Reaching out to Hamas would weaken the moderate, Western-backed Mahmoud Abbas, who heads the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and is Israel's current partner in peace talks.

•Should Obama attempt to seek a regional Arab-Israeli settlement?

"There is one thing that is very important for him, and that's Iraq. In order to leave Iraq, he needs peace in the Middle East," said Yossi Beilin, former left-wing member of Israel's parliament.

Israel and Syria have conducted indirect peace talks this year and could be poised for direct U.S.-brokered talks.

•Is this the right time for a peace deal?

Benjamin Netanyahu, chairman of the conservative Likud Party, had signaled he would cut off negotiations if elected prime minister. But he reversed course recently after meeting with international peace envoy Tony Blair.

Tzipi Livni, the other leading candidate for prime minister, who is the current foreign minister and head of Israel's negotiating team, is a safe bet to continue negotiations.

Finally, there is the question of pursuing peace with a leader, Abbas, who represents only part of the territory that would make up a Palestinian state.

Cox News Service