We've never heard so many hymns and praises salute the election of a United States president to this degree. It's true that Obama embodies a salutary seismic event in that great democracy. When the violins have died down, we'll see better how this event - freighted today with symbols - will take on its true meaning in the real world. Fortunately, the man is sufficiently well-armed with intelligence and sang-froid to face the redoubtable confrontation between his partisans' exaltation and good management's disciplines. That will be his main challenge. Concretely, his first project will be the establishment of - a finally decent - social safety net. He will have to master the tensions between urgent requirements and the resistance of powerful lobbies that profit from the present disorganization (doctors, lawyers, insurance companies) taking care all the while to contain the collateral financial imbalances. Public finances, yet again, risk being affected by his announced program of fiscal justice; since - according to the laws of experience - fiscal reductions conceded to the armies of the middle classes are rarely counterbalanced by added taxation on the few battalions of the rich. The federal budget, moreover, will have to support the weight of public works projects become necessary due to a long failure to act and especially opportune under the present depressed circumstances of the business cycle. Still, the burdensome Bush inheritance mortgages this new spending with already-established deficits that, strictly speaking, one should not allow to be followed by more. That alone suggests how much it is in Obama's interest to use his state of grace to institute his reforms as soon as possible and to explain the difficulties of the exercise to public opinion.

    In fact, after the exceptional consensus it will have enjoyed, sooner or later the White House will be exposed to three risks that could feed unprecedented forms of instability: categorical demands from minorities intensified by their long exclusion, possible outbreaks of an "extreme left" exploiting the government's inability to satisfy all demands, symmetric exasperation of "white" fanatics from whom everything is to be feared, including firearms ... One may find this a pessimistic scenario. In any case, Obama's entourage, now confronted with the demanding mission of governing, does not underestimate these risks - or the many others they will confront, including how to emerge from the prevailing "Obamania" without too much damage. The argument that no policy could be worse than Bush's will only serve them for a while. All the rest is yet to be done.

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    Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.