It's easy to look like a hero when you walk through the door, say corporate crisis managers.
But then it hits you: You have to run the dump. It's worse than you thought. You can't blame the previous CEO forever.
The turnaround manager named Barack Obama is getting his reality check even before he gets the keys.
Since August, U.S. employers have shed 524,000 jobs, the government reported yesterday. That's the worst two-month loss since right after the 2001 terrorist attacks.
Before that, you have to go back to the 1982 recession to find a poorer performance.
October unemployment was 6.5 percent, the highest in 14 years. The stock market, which seemed to be anticipating an eventual recovery last week, changed its mind. And consumer confidence, which Obama knows is key to reversing economic decline, is at a record low.
Sure, we've seen downturns before. Bad ones.
Obama's problem, however, is that the government's anti-recession medicine is already nearly gone, at least in traditional doses.
Washington fights downturns by cutting taxes, increasing government spending and lowering interest rates.
But personal income taxes are already far lower than in other developed nations, thanks largely to cuts championed by President Bush in 2001 and 2003.
Invading Iraq, the Medicare drug plan and bailing out bankers have caused spending to go off the rails.
Tax cuts and spending binges since Bush took over have doubled the federal debt to its highest level as a portion of the economy since the 1950s, when the country was paying off World War II loans.
As for interest rates, Ben S. Bernanke has already cut the short-term price of money to match a 40-year low reached in 2003.
The last time short-term rates sank to 1 percent, recession had been declared more than a year previously.
Now we're at 1 percent, and the National Bureau of Economic Research hasn't even made it official yet. That suggests we're early in the game.
Rates will almost certainly fall further. But you can't go below zero without abusing mathematics or paying people to borrow money, neither of which is likely to happen.
Stocks and struggling banking and car companies symbolize the crisis. But the heart of the matter is the consumer, who accounts for 70 percent of the economy. Consumers are in rougher shape than at any time since the early 1980s.
