Great expectations: if Barack Obama meets the enormous challenges facing the nation, he could go down in history as one of America's great Presidents. But his success is far from assured at a time of crisis at home and threats abroad.

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Great expectations: if Barack Obama meets the enormous challenges facing the nation, he could go down in history as one of America's great Presidents. But his success is far from assured at a time of crisis at home and threats abroad.

For more than two centuries, great crises have created the opportunity to forge great presidencies.

If the long-simmering Civil War had not broken out a month after his inauguration in 1861, Abraham Lincoln would not be known as the man who saved the Union from dissolution. If Franklin D. Roosevelt had been elected at a time of prosperity, rather than in the midst of the Great Depression in 1932, he would never have overseen the creation of the New Deal and left a legacy including the Social Security system and minimum standards of living for millions of Americans that we take for granted today.

But simply b...

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