"There's a lot of ground giving under him. It's a terrific challenge," said Fred Greenstein, a Princeton University professor emeritus of politics and a presidential historian.
"From one perspective, it's as if he's about to take over the captain's job on a sinking ship. From the other perspective, he could be on a glide path to Mount Rushmore if he does a combination of morale building and energizing people while dealing with the economic distress by producing some constructive changes in the society and in the economy."
"The striking thing is he doesn't seem scared," Greenstein added.
Indeed, Obama exudes confidence. He has surrounded himself with people in his incoming White House and Cabinet who have decades more experience than him in government, as well as foreign and domestic policy. They include big names such as Hillary Rodham Clinton, Larry Summers, Tom Daschle and Robert Gates, longtime Washington insiders.
Comparatively, Obama has been on the national stage for a short time. He was introduced to the country during the Democratic convention in 2004 when he was in the Illinois Legislature and running for the US Senate. Age 47, he will become president after serving just four years in the Senate
Most historians liken the situation facing Obama to that which confronted Roosevelt - but the comparison does not seem to do justice to the colossal challenges Obama is facing.
Roosevelt was already an established politician when he came into office at the depths of the Great Depression in a society with no safety net for the suffering. And the economy was much worse then than it is now. But he did not have two wars on his plate, nor a political scandal swirling nearby. And Roosevelt did not have a planet suffering from global warming and watching its natural resources dwindle.
He also let his four-month transition pass by keeping his distance from Republican Herbert Hoover. The two men had sharp policy differences over how to address the Great Depression, and Roosevelt stayed mum between his election and his inauguration.
Not Obama. He's been extraordinarily active since his election.
With each new bit of bad economic news, he makes his views known - though he always is careful to defer to Bush when it's decision time. As president-elect, however, Obama's words now carry the power to move financial markets - perhaps even more so than those of Bush.
He has held regular news conferences to announce his Cabinet, and he gives the Democratic radio address on most weekends.
"Part of what he's doing is paying lip service to the notion that there's only one president while sucking up all the oxygen," Greenstein said.
Politically, with things so bad, Obama can claim any change for the better as a success. If the economic and security situation deteriorates further, he can rightly say he inherited a mess.
Obama won the election with more than 50 percent of the popular vote, and nearly three-fourths of people in an AP-GfK poll last week said they approved of how Obama has been handling the transition.
Judging by those numbers, he has plenty of political capital to spend as he tackles the country's mounting problems.
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