OBAMAs moment

Barack Obama took office on Tuesday with the prospect of joining ranks of historys most powerful presidents. That he confronts daunting trials,enhances that prospect...

Barack Obama took office on Tuesday with the prospect of joining ranks of historys most powerful presidents. That he confronts daunting trials,enhances that prospect. Emergencies have always brought commensurate new authority for the presidents who faced them because the public demanded action,and because rival branches of government went along.

Obama arrives with a rare convergence of additional strengths,some inherited,some of his own making. Historians,recent White House officials and senior members of the incoming team expressed broad agreement that Number 44 begins his term in command of an office that is at or near its historic zenith.

The opportunity is there for Obama to recast the very nature of the presidency, said Sean Wilentz,presidential historian at Princeton. Not since Reagan have we had as capable a persuader as Obama,and not since FDR has a president come in with quite the configuration of foreign and domestic crises that open up such a possibility for the reconstruction of the executive.

No president has begun his term with so broad a wave of public confidence 78 approval in the Gallup poll. House and Senate Democrats are united behind him. The Republicans are fractured. If Obama keeps the loyalty of the online social networks he used to win election,his White House could be the first to harness a grassroots movement as a tool of governance.

The federal government itself is a potent instrument,in the breadth and depth of command over national life,than it has ever been before. The Bush and Clinton years saw an incredible period of state-building thats unrivaled in American history except by the creation of the national security state in the 1940s and 50s, said Jack Balkin of Yale.

Obamas style of governance may not differ as much from Bushs as some supporters expect.

He has pledged to take greater heed of Congress,but he has not disowned the assertion that a president may disregard a statute or judges ruling.

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John D Podesta,who led the new administrations transition team,distinguished between Obamas promise to keep the dialogue with Congress and his willingness to compromise on core objectives.

He certainly comes into office with a very powerful set of executive authorities,and I suspect that he will use those authorities in order to get the key policy goals accomplished that hes set for the people, Podesta said. Political power gives him the capacity,I suppose,to kind of roll over his opposition,but what hes shown is a keen understanding that lots of change comes when you have dialogue,reach out to Congress and take account of it. Thats not to say hell adjust the goals that he laid before the public in the election.

Obama advisers are aware of the risks of taking on too many tasks at once or of provoking a backlash with too muscular a claim of authority. Obviously you want to avoid squandering power,and you want to avoid any sense that youre abusing power, said a member of the new White House.