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During the US presidential campaigning, neither candidate was about to let the financial crisis dictate a wholesale remake of his economic platform. As the markets crashed and the recession rolled in, every promise stood, however ancient its provenance, as though nothing had changed and dealing with the crisis was a separate issue. It took Barack Obama three days – from the election result to his first press conference – to think again.

At said conference, the president-elect declined to confirm that he would raise top tax rates soon. Is he wondering if John McCain, his Republican opponent, was right, and this is no time to be raising anybody’s taxes? Mr Obama also said that his promised tax cuts for “95 per cent of working families” should be seen as part of a new fiscal stimulus. Previously, he had not mentioned this as a reason for cutting taxes. On the contrary, he had emphasised that his plan was roughly revenue neutral, implying that any stimulus would be second order.

A question too complicated for campaign speeches, and which neither side even wanted to think about, now needs an answer. How can the next administration reconcile its longer-term goals for the economy with the imperatives of the economic crisis? Getting this right will not be easy, but is the key to success or failure in Mr Obama’s presidency.

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In the US presidential election of 1932 Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign song was: “Happy Days Are Here Again”. He won. Four years later, happy days had not returned: unemployment was down but still exceeded 15 per cent. That year, FDR was re-elected in a landslide that makes Barack Obama’s victory look small. He carried every state but Vermont and Maine and more than 60 per cent of the popular vote. He led the Democrats to majorities of 334 to 88 in the House of Representatives and 76 to 17 in the Senate.

The economy promptly tanked. In the end it was revived not by the New Deal but by the war FDR had promised to stay out of. He won two more presidential elections.

The similarities between 1932 and 2008 make the temptation to draw parallels impossible to resist. One lesson that might give the president-elect comfort is that voters can overlook a lot of failure if they are sure that a president is on their side. Persuading them of this was FDR’s surpassing talent. Mr Obama may have the same knack.

The history of the Great Depression is obscured by partisan mythology. One must steer a middle course between regarding FDR as a kind of saint who delivered the US from economic collapse and global conflict, and a malicious bungler who trashed the constitution and prolonged the Depression. Perhaps it is a moot point whether Mr Obama should even wish to be another FDR. If the thought should cross his mind, though, here are some things to consider.

After a prolonged and deliberately stalled transition – he and Herbert Hoover could not work together – FDR started with a bang. He dealt decisively with the financial aspect of the economic crisis. He closed the banks and used the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to recapitalise those sound enough to reopen. Most promptly did reopen and confidence in banks revived. He also took the dollar off the gold standard and let it depreciate. These were abrupt departures from Hoover’s policies and they worked.

Then it was mostly a case of one step forward, two steps back. In his first 100 days FDR passed a blizzard of new laws – a standard other presidents seem expected to meet, though why is unclear. Banking and finance aside, the first months of the New Deal were a muddle.

Public works created new employment. But the Agricultural Adjustment Act aimed to support farm incomes through price and production controls; its fingerprints are on today’s wasteful farm policies. Then came the National Recovery Administration to oversee a complex web of industrial regulation. This was based on the idea that too much production (not too little demand) was prolonging the slump. The NRA slowed the recovery. When the Supreme Court shut it down in 1935, growth picked up.

FDR persisted with taxes and other measures aimed at “economic royalists” – big business and the rich. Most likely, these also did more harm than good. Of greatest lasting significance, however, he laid the foundations of the welfare state in the Social Security Act of 1935. This did less than it might have to hasten recovery. New social security taxes began to be collected in 1936; benefits were not to be paid until a fund had been built up. (FDR was no Keynesian.) Nonetheless, the act created a programme that Americans today regard as inviolable.

FDR changed the country by changing what citizens demand of government. Economic hardship was no longer a private problem. It was the government’s responsibility to provide some measure of economic security. Deploying a modern mastery of public relations, Roosevelt embraced this responsibility; and though the results were not always good, he did his best to discharge it. The country loved him for this.

Is Mr Obama an FDR for the new century? A president has many ways of ruining his reputation, and this is a different world, yet the idea looks plausible. Like Roosevelt, Mr Obama inherits a crisis not of his making. Like Roosevelt, he is brimming with energy to get things done. Like Roosevelt – happy days are here again – he has given the country a jolt of optimism just by turning up. FDR understood that his greatest strength was not being Hoover; he emphasised (and exaggerated) the differences. Mr Obama gets it and does not have to try so hard. Could he be more different from George W. Bush?

Some of Roosevelt’s paths to reverence are closed. The transition is likely to be co-operative. The outgoing administration has already acted boldly to stabilise the financial system. Mr Obama will build on that – much as FDR’s jobs programmes expanded and rebranded some of Hoover’s. In managing the immediate crisis, he will find it difficult to make a decisive break. As for attitudes to government, a change as great as the one FDR made can happen only once.

Like FDR, on the other hand, Mr Obama accepts the duty to provide economic security more eagerly than his predecessor did, at a time when that promise, however difficult it may be to keep, has great new appeal. He has a signature policy as well – healthcare reform – that gives that obligation concrete form and could do for his place in history what social security did for Roosevelt’s.

Above all, like FDR, Mr Obama is a great persuader. When it comes to making voters believe he is on their side, he is to Mr Bush as Roosevelt was to Hoover. An early economic recovery would be good, but FDR showed that some things matter more.

Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency will be seen as one of the most brilliantly planned and executed in the country’s history. The challenges that will confront him as president do not rise to quite that level – the US does not face Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, and it is not literally at war with itself – but they will suffice to be getting on with.

What happens when an irresistible politician meets an immovable political or economic reality? Is a superb campaigner equipped to be a good president in testing circumstances?

Or is it rather as Bob Dylan put it: “The louder they come, the harder they crack?”

Mr Obama’s stunning political talents are indeed great assets, more so in the US system than they would be elsewhere. His mastery of the campaigning art has two aspects – and both should be as valuable in office as they were in winning it.

One is his personal magnetism. He is an instantly likeable man; a fine orator yet no demagogue; an intellectual but not inclined to show off about it; a calm and calming presence. The other is that, on the evidence of this campaign, he is an exceptionally cool and competent manager. No Drama Obama, they call him.

Compare the discipline and single-mindedness of Mr Obama’s campaign with the shambles of John McCain’s. Compare its steady consistency of tone and message with the squabbling, indecisive, misdirected efforts of Hillary Clinton and her team.

If you ask why George W. Bush was such a bad president, it is partly because he scores so poorly as a leader and as a manager. Most Americans found him a likeable man, to be sure, but none would accuse him of being an inspiring speaker, or even always an intelligible one.

At times a country needs its spirits lifted, or its nerves steadied. Mr Bush spoke well for the nation after the terror attacks of 9/11, but subsequently failed to rise to this challenge. His faltering, glassy-eyed pep-talks of recent weeks, with the financial system breaking down and the economy falling into recession, alarmed more people than they reassured.

As for Mr Bush’s management skills, one need only think of the war in Iraq or the administration’s lamentable handling of Hurricane Katrina.

An indispensable talent in a president is the ability to delegate well – to appoint good people (a president can choose from the best) and get the soundest advice.

To a pathological degree, Mr Bush has valued political loyalty over competence. Whatever one thinks of his goals, the results speak for themselves. Mr Obama’s choice of advisers is impeccable, and not drawn from a narrow circle of friends and allies. He demands to be exposed to counter-arguments; he is not always looking to have his own prejudices shored up.

Admirable as these traits may be, Mr Obama is untested in high office. Governing is not campaigning. An audience can be charmed by a well-turned phrase and a winning manner. Facts on the ground are less susceptible, and starting with the economy Mr Obama has to deal with some especially bloody-minded instances.

He promised in his victory speech: “I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face.” Maybe in future he will be, but his economic platform – promising lower taxes for almost everyone and greatly expanded public programmes too – was hardly forthright.

He may in the end be a victim of his own talent. He set out to raise expectations and he did: they are impossibly high.

His ability to manage disappointment is so far untested. That is about to change.

The best, most thorough, and most straightforward account of how Obama did it appears, aptly enough, on the website of Reader’s Digest, written by my friend and former colleague Carl Cannon.

For a supplementary reading on how my profession disgraced itself this year see Harold Evans (no knee-jerk conservative) in The Guardian.

If the administration would like a blueprint for screwing up the next four years, John Judis has written it for them at the New Republic. The Republican party is destroyed, the Democratic party now owns the country outright, the post-industrial United States is a centre-left country. (Can membership of the European Union be far behind?) To remain in power for decades, all liberals need is the nerve to be bold. Judis makes some excellent points. He is right that the Republicans are in even worse trouble than you might think–but I suspect that the surest way to help them out of their hole would be to follow his advice.

A remarkable moment, and a truly amazing achievement. The result was not a surprise; even so, it will take a while to sink in. The country has crossed a threshold.

A convincing and comfortable victory (in electoral-college terms, though far from a landslide in the popular vote). So much for the Bradley effect: an idea, let us hope, whose time has passed. Independents broke heavily in his favour, and he won support right across the country, from all demographic categories. Barack Obama will be president because of this great breadth of appeal and because of his extraordinary magnetism. By themselves, especially when you remember the challenges that confront him, these won’t make him a great president, but they suggest that he has it in him to be a great president. At the mere thought of this possibility, one’s spirits lift.

From John McCain’s gracious concession speech: “A century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt’s invitation of Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House was taken as an outrage in many quarters. America today is a world away from the cruel and prideful bigotry of that time. There is no better evidence of this than the election of an African-American to the presidency of the United States.”

Will the result be closer than the polls suggest? Up to now I haven’t given much credence to the “Bradley effect” theory of latent racism, perhaps out of wishful thinking, but also because recent studies have tended to say the evidence does not support it. This article on VoxEU has given me pause.

Should Barack Obama worry about the Bradley effect? The much-discussed effect refers to observed discrepancies between voter opinion polls and election outcomes, in which African-American candidates receive a smaller vote share than would be predicted using opinion polls. In this column, I study US congressional and gubernatorial contests from 1998 to 2006 – black candidates on average receive a 2-3% lower share of the two-party vote than non-black candidates with similar numbers in the polls. If an effect of a similar size would appear in the current presidential race, then it would lower Obama’s probability of winning from 85% to 53%.

In other words, it says the effect is small but real–real enough, in a race that is close to begin with, to alter the outcome. The study seems to be a careful piece of work, and it has an explanation for the fact that other studies have come up with a different answer. This election is very different from the ones in the study’s historical sample, of course, so maybe the finding is barely relevant in any case. A disturbing read, nonetheless.

As a British citizen residing in Washington DC, I have no vote in Tuesday’s election. (So much for “no taxation without representation”.) If I did, I would cast it for Barack Obama, with reservations.

I understand and share in the excitement that Mr Obama has generated during the course of his campaign. He is an extraordinary politician: instantly likeable, a brilliant speaker, a genuine intellectual, a seeker of consensus, undogmatic, calm, pragmatic and open-minded, with unaffected empathy for the less fortunate. He is the very model of an appealing centre-left leader.

Because of these qualities, he would be a star in US politics if he were white – but he also happens to be black. It arouses accusations of “reverse racism” to point this out, but let us not be squeamish: the fact that he is black is another huge point in his favour.

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I’ve had a lot of emails about my piece on McCain’s failure to sell his main tax proposal–the refundable credit for health insurance. The article explained how the credit would leave most middle-income Americans paying less tax than under Obama’s plans. As it happens, taken together, I prefer Obama’s tax and health-care proposals to McCain’s: I think McCain’s health credit is good as far as it goes, but it does not go nearly far enough. Obama’s plan would expand coverage much more, and it seems to me that this should be a key goal. However, the fact remains that McCain’s plan would put more disposable income (net of taxes and health-care outlays) in the pockets of most middle-income voters.

Well, you would not guess this from the way the McCain campaign has dealt with the issue. Joe the Plumber and the preoccupation with Obama’s thinking on redistribution has clouded what surely ought to have been the main thing, from a tactical point of view. Anyway, as many have pointed out, we are all redistributionists in principle. Republicans too believe in spreading the wealth around. Is McCain planning to abolish the earned-income tax credit? Is he proposing a flat-rate income tax with no exemptions? It is a question of how far, not whether.

Many of the emails I received began, “You are just wrong,” and came from accounting firms, lawyers, and academics of one sort or another. I was initially disconcerted. What had I missed, I wondered? But no, it turns out, my correspondents had simply misunderstood McCain’s proposal in one way or another–and I don’t blame them for having done so. He is offering a refundable tax credit, not an ordinary credit (which can only be set against taxes owed) and not a deduction in taxable income (which would provide a much smaller tax saving); this credit would also be paid to people with employer-provided health insurance, not just to people who buy their own; and the existing payroll-tax exemption for health insurance would continue under the McCain plan (if this were abolished too, his plan would cut disposable income rather than increase it for many households). These were the most popular reasons for believing I was mistaken, and for maintaining that the Obama proposals would give middle-income households a bigger overall tax cut. Even sophisticated voters have failed to get the message: McCain is offering middle-income American a bigger tax cut than Obama.

Am I naive to suppose that this would have been a stronger selling-point than Joe the Plumber? Wouldn’t it have been a good idea to make sure this was understood?

The odds in the US election were piled against Senator John McCain from the start. His party chose him reluctantly in the first place. He was nominated not by acclamation but by elimination, leaving many Republicans asking what had happened. So far as the wider electorate was concerned, he was asking to succeed a president of his own party who, by the end, was setting records for unpopularity.

During the campaign Mr McCain saw his strongest issue, national security, lose much of its previous urgency. The economy, where he was much less confident, took its place as the country’s greatest concern – and how. The next president faces the most challenging economic crisis since the Depression of the 1930s. On top of everything else, a press that had loved Mr McCain when he was a thorn in the side of the Republican party was certain to turn against him once he might become the next Republican president. And so it did.

Everything pointed the same way: 2008 would be a Democratic year. To overcome these odds – to go into next week’s election ahead in the polls, instead of where he is, five to 10 points behind – Mr McCain had to fight a flawless campaign and Senator Barack Obama had to slip up. As things turned out, it was the other way round.

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So much has gone wrong for John McCain that it is surprising he is not further behind in the polls. He has been a victim of circumstances and his own bad judgment. Some of his errors, however, are more perplexing than others. How is it, for example, that Mr McCain has been so thoroughly outmanoeuvred on tax policy?

Both candidates have offered complex tax proposals. Proliferating alternative baselines (with or without the extension of the Bush tax cuts, with or without a “patch” for the alternative minimum tax, and so forth) deepen the confusion. Unable to fathom the details, voters are left to weigh the competing slogans. Mr Obama promises to cut taxes for 95 per cent of working families. Mr McCain says the rich need a tax cut, too. Guess who wins that argument.

Here is a fact you might not have noticed. It certainly seems to have slipped by most Americans. The typical US household would get a bigger tax cut under Mr McCain’s proposals than under Mr Obama’s. I know a few politicians who could do something with that.

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