How Will Barak Fare?

Tight credit, joblessness, taxes and trade pose tough challenges.

'It's 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep. But there's a phone in the White House and it's ringing." Those lines from a Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign commercial invoked images of a president responding in the dead of night to "evil" forces threatening Americans' safety. These days, however, the 3 a.m. phone call to the White House is just as likely to come from the secretary of the Treasury, warning of an Asian stock market plummeting or a European government taking over another major bank. That's not a political scare tactic; it's an all-too-real consequence of the subprime mortgage fiasco.