You think Abraham Lincoln had it tough?

James Forsyth says that Barack Obama will need all his remarkable talents to confront an extraordinary set of challenges — not only the economy, but global security

Short of wearing a stove-pipe hat, Obama could not make his desire to be compared to Abraham Lincoln any more obvious. He plans to travel to his inauguration via the same route that Lincoln did, be sworn in on the Lincoln Bible and eat lunch off replicas of the Lincolns’ White House china. Michelle and the girls must have wondered if he was going to change their name when he took them to the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday night.

Obama has set a high bar for himself; comparisons with America’s greatest president are rarely favourable to an incumbent. Bush and Clinton both chose to set less daunting presidents as their benchmarks, Reagan and Kennedy, respectively.

But the President-elect has never been shy about setting ambitious goals. The night he sealed the Democratic nomination, he confidently declared: ‘I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs for the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth.’

Can Obama live up to his own words? Realistically, making it through the next four years without any major disasters would, in the present circumstances, be a great achievement and almost certainly enough to get him re-elected.

No president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has faced such a daunting set of challenges.