[h1]Obama Lays Plans to Kill Expectations After Election Victory[/h1]
[h2]Confident in an Election Day win, the campaign looks to lower supporters' expectations on concerns their hopes of 'change'
are unrealistic, a senior aide says
[/h2]
Friday, 2008-31-305
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By Tim Reid, The Times of London
Barack
Obama's senior advisers have drawn up plans to lower expectations for
his presidency if he wins next week's election, amid concerns that many
of his euphoric supporters are harboring unrealistic hopes of what he
can achieve.
The sudden financial crisis
and the prospect of a deep and painful recession have increased the
urgency inside the Obama team to bring people down to earth, after a
campaign in which his soaring rhetoric and promises of "hope" and
"change" are now confronted with the reality of a stricken economy.
One
senior adviser told The Times that the first few weeks of the
transition, immediately after the election, were critical, "so there's
not a vast mood swing from exhilaration and euphoria to despair."
The aide said that Obama himself was the first to realize that expectations
risked being inflated.
In an interview with a Colorado radio station, Obama appeared to be engaged already in expectation
lowering. Asked about his goals for the first hundred days, he said he would need more time to tackle such big and costly
issues as health care reform, global warming and Iraq.
"The first hundred days is going to be important, but it's probably
going to be the first thousand days that makes the difference," he said. He has also been reminding crowds in recent days
how "hard" it will be to achieve his goals, and that it will take time.
"I
won't stand here and pretend that any of this will be easy --
especially now," Obama told a rally in Sarasota, Florida, yesterday,
citing "the cost of this economic crisis, and the cost of the war in
Iraq." Obama's transition team is headed by John Podesta, a Washington
veteran and a former chief-of-staff to Bill Clinton. He has spent
months overseeing a virtual Democratic government-in-exile to plan a
smooth transition should Obama emerge victorious next week.
The plans are so far advanced that an Obama Cabinet has been largely decided
upon, with the expectation that most of his senior appointments could be announced shortly after election day.
