The stakes in the U.S. presidential election may be the highest in decades, with danger spots multiplying around the world and economic threats looming at home.
The election process - the first in 56 years that doesn't involve an incumbent president or vice president - has moved into high gear after Barack Obama's upset of national front runner Hillary Clinton in the Iowa Democratic caucuses and a similar defeat in Iowa of Republican leader Mitt Romney by Mike Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas.
After the New Hampshire primary this Tuesday, no more than a third of the 20 Democrats and Republicans who took part in last year's debates are likely to be left standing.
Both Democrats and Republicans are stressing the election's importance, spending record amounts of money to convince voters they are best-suited to take on crises ranging from global terrorism and the war in Iraq to a housing slump that threatens to send the U.S. economy into recession.
"This is roughly like the time of the beginning of the Cold War, when the country was searching for a wise policy to meet the international challenges," says presidential historian Robert Dallek. "That's really the big issue of this election." Domestic concerns are no less pressing. In addition to a wave of real-estate foreclosures, the economy is under stress from funding crises facing Medicare and Social Security, and 47 million Americans still lack health insurance.
"The issues are immense," says Julian Zelizer, a history professor at Princeton University. "One of the big questions the next president will need to deal with is the economic insecurity of middle-class Americans. Another will be health care, which both parties now agree has become a serious problem." The only two recent elections where the stakes were clearly as high were in 1968, when the next president would have to confront the divisive Vietnam war, and in 1980, when the Iranian hostage crisis was undermining U.S. prestige abroad and stagflation was undermining the economy at home.
History has shown Iowa and New Hampshire to be make-or-break contests for some candidates. Democrat John Kerry capitalized on a come-from-behind victory in Iowa in 2004 to sweep through much of the rest of the country, and some pundits are suggesting that Obama may do the same.
