Awaiting the winner: Job woes, debt, war and more

WASHINGTON (AP) 11.4.12 — The next pres­i­dent will be under fire to get mil­lions of peo­ple back to work, shrink a soar­ing fed­eral debt, end America’s longest war, unite a divided coun­try and pre­vent Iran from build­ing a bomb that could unnerve the world.

And that’s just what comes after the inauguration.

The work that begins right after Tuesday’s elec­tion could deter­mine whether the White House and Con­gress can keep the coun­try from plung­ing back into reces­sion in the new year. That’s because with­out action by the nation’s lead­ers, a bat­tery of tax increases and spend­ing cuts will kick in come Jan­u­ary, mak­ing life harder for fam­i­lies and endan­ger­ing the eco­nomic recovery.

Win or lose, Pres­i­dent Barack Obama will be in charge until Jan. 20, which means deal­ing with this “fis­cal cliff” is his prob­lem. But Repub­li­can Mitt Rom­ney wants to have a sig­nif­i­cant stamp on the mat­ter as president-elect if he wins.

The econ­omy, sta­ble but strug­gling, will drive the agenda in the next term. It touches all the core issues that the elec­tion has been about — middle-class secu­rity, job cre­ation, home val­ues, taxes, basic oppor­tu­nity for a bet­ter life.

The next pres­i­dent will not be deal­ing with the com­bined chaos of a finan­cial sec­tor, an employ­ment pic­ture and a stock mar­ket in free-fall, all of which started to con­sume Obama even before he was sworn in on Jan. 20, 2009.

Yet the pub­lic will expect results soon.

More than 23 mil­lion peo­ple are unem­ployed, work­ing part time when they want full-time jobs or out of patience look­ing for work. Obama and Rom­ney have both promised a more robust rebound, but they’re deeply divided over the best ways to get there.

The new pres­i­dent prob­a­bly will get to nom­i­nate at least one Supreme Court jus­tice, if not up to three, as Vice Pres­i­dent Joe Biden has sug­gested. Even one such life­time appoint­ment could tip the ide­o­log­i­cal bal­ance of the high court.

And the world will not wait to test the next pres­i­dent, either.

Iran’s years­long stand­off with the West over its nuclear pro­gram is inten­si­fy­ing. Israeli Prime Min­is­ter Ben­jamin Netanyahu has warned that allies have until next sum­mer to stop Iran from hav­ing the capa­bil­ity to build a nuclear bomb. What­ever the time­line, the U.S. pres­i­dent will be under pres­sure to rally part­ners, enforce already crip­pling penal­ties and deepen the threat of mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion to keep Iran in check, or risk see­ing the United States pulled into another war.

Other inter­na­tional crises demand­ing Amer­i­can lead­er­ship are everywhere.

Syria’s civil war has left more than 30,000 dead and count­ing. Israelis and Pales­tini­ans are nowhere near peace. Europe’s finan­cial trou­bles threaten America’s eco­nomic sta­bil­ity. Mexico’s fight against guns and drugs is on the U.S. door step. The Arab Spring has faded into fears of insta­bil­ity and, in one case, left four dead Amer­i­cans in Libya.

The threat of ter­ror­ism may no longer hang over daily life in the United States, but it will for the pres­i­dent, whose most sacred job is pro­tect­ing Amer­ica. And that prison for sus­pected ter­ror­ists in Guan­tanamo Bay, Cuba? Still open.

The U.S.-led war in Afghanistan is still going, too, after more than 11 years. The United States and its part­ners plan to end the war at the close of 2014. The pres­i­dent must decide when and how to pull home the 68,000 U.S. troops who remain and whether to cut a deal with the Afghan gov­ern­ment to leave some last­ing U.S. mil­i­tary pres­ence after that.

At home, the pres­i­den­tial win­ner is likely to find strug­gles Con­gress. Obama, the Demo­c­rat, is almost cer­tain to be con­tend­ing again with a Republican-led House. Even if vot­ers choose Rom­ney, they may well keep the Sen­ate in con­trol of Democ­rats, which would limit his leg­isla­tive agenda.

Indeed, the basic state of Wash­ing­ton pol­i­tics is broken.

The next pres­i­dent will inherit that prob­lem, which is often beyond the president’s abil­ity to fix despite cam­paign promises, as Obama and Repub­li­can George W. Bush before him found.

Should the elec­tion be a close as polls sug­gest, the pres­i­dent in 2013 will be lead­ing a nation in which about half the peo­ple voted against him. Most states are so decid­edly Demo­c­ra­tic or Repub­li­can they were not even con­tested this year. In a coun­try built by dream­ers, hope and opti­mism are sagging.

The impend­ing fis­cal cri­sis will have a cas­cad­ing effect on the next pres­i­den­tial term.

How it is resolved will shape the chances of seri­ous change ahead on tax law and enti­tle­ment pro­grams such as Medicare.

Jan­u­ary is on pace to bring across-the-board spend­ing cuts of $109 bil­lion, which, in real terms, would under­mine the mil­i­tary and the core func­tions of gov­ern­ment. The cuts were never intended to take effect. They were an oner­ous incen­tive for law­mak­ers to reach a broad deficit-reduction deal, but that never happened.

The fis­cal cliff also gets its name from a series of expir­ing tax cuts. Rom­ney wants to extend all the Bush-era tax cuts. Obama wants to extend them only for indi­vid­u­als mak­ing less than $200,000 and mar­ried cou­ples mak­ing less than $250,000. The new pres­i­dent also will have to get Con­gress to increase the debt limit again to avoid a crip­pling default.

The debt is now above $16 tril­lion, with cries from every cor­ner to reduce that fig­ure or risk a chok­ing of the economy.

It’s one of the best known chal­lenges await­ing: The unknown. A drought, a bridge col­lapse, a mass shoot­ing, a major oil spill.

It will be the job of the next pres­i­dent of the United States, ulti­mately, to han­dle everything.

Posted by Randa Wagner on Nov 4 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.