An Untested President
Obama has been in office a short while (in the big picture) and I found this article by Robert Kaplan quite informative. In it he outlines the large number of potential crises that Obama hasn’t had the luxury of months of preparation to make a decision about.
Yes, Obama has faced great crises and choices already: the meltdown of the economy, the bailout of the Detroit automobile companies, the release of the Bush-era memorandums on torture. But all of these crisis were entirely predictable. They are leftovers from the last administration. And the decisions Obama has made on them are the product of staff meetings going back to the days before he was even elected. In all of them he has had the advantage of advance planning. The piracy incident off the coast of Somalia and the swine flu epidemic (provided it doesn’t get worse) do not qualify as crises that define a presidency.