All change: Can Obama save the U.S. economy?

MarvinSP

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Change -- probably the single word used more than any other by President-elect Barack Obama to enunciate his vision of a post-Bush America.

Flagged-up in speeches, interviews, book titles -- "Change We Can Believe In: Barack Obama's Plan to Renew America's Promise" -- and on just about every piece of Obama campaign merchandise you care to mention, Obama and his team have spent the past 21 months hammering home the message that an Obama presidency will represent a fundamental shift in direction from what has come before.

Check out the Obama-Biden transition team's web site -- titled, not surprisingly, www.change.gov -- and you will find that there is no area of government policy in which Obama is not hoping to "bring about the kind of change America needs."

Looming large over everything, however -- the dominant issue confronting the President-elect and his economic team -- is the U.S. economy, and how to steer it out of what Obama himself describes as "a crisis of historic proportions."

It is the issue that by some distance most concerns the U.S. electorate -- research by pollsters Edison and Mitofsky showed that 62 percent of voters placed it top of their list of concerns -- and the one on which Obama has focused most of his energies since November 4.

"A president needs to rank his priorities," says Professor Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the White House Transition Project, a non-partisan organization that helps smooth the exchange of powers between one administration and the next.

"In this case there is no question that the top priority is the economy and achieving financial stability. That's why, in his first press conference after the election, Obama appeared with his entire economic transition team.

"He wanted to send a message -- it's his key concern."

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