By Mike Christensen, CQ Staff

A war that won’t end, prosperity that appears to be ending too soon, health care that’s not accessible, food prices that keep going up, gas prices that won’t stay down — the problems tumble pell-mell across the national agenda.

It makes you wonder why anyone would even want to be president right now. The challenges facing President Bush’s successor come January — Republican John McCain or Democrat Barack Obama — seem almost superhumanly daunting, even without the near-collapse of the nation’s financial system.

Whoever is elected, says veteran political scientist James A. Thurber, “they’re going to inherit a mess that’s going to continue at least four years.”

Americans can be forgiven their deep pessimism — eight out of 10 think the country is headed in the wrong direction — and for their loss of trust in the president and Congress to do much about it: Both are at or near historically low approval ratings.

The public’s customary cynicism about politics and politicians, in fact, seems to have deepened, as well, as economic problems have multiplied and scandal has followed scandal. A recent Gallup Poll found that Americans have the most confidence in the military and local institutions — the police, small business and churches — and the least faith in large organizations such as the presidency, big business, the news media and Congress.

Such surveys are reminiscent of the national “crisis of confidence” that President Jimmy Carter decried in 1979 — though he was unable to do much about it — and nearly as disturbing, in some quarters, as the fear that confronted President Franklin D. Roosevelt when he took office in the spring of 1933, admitting that “only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.”

Leadership that could restore the country’s confidence in itself was the quality that Roosevelt brought to the White House that year — and that will be of overarching importance to whoever is elected president next month. Once that is established, it will be easier for the new president to tackle the other, more concrete national problems.

The recent turmoil in Congress over a bill to help the financial industry tells experts such as Thurber, who is the director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University, that “no core of political authority exists” to manage such a crisis. Bush’s political capital has all but vanished; Congress’ authority is diffused among too many members with competing interests.

The result is that the bill that the House at first defeated had been framed as a bailout for Wall Street, and no one was available to explain to the public in clear terms how the crisis had come about and how much of a personal, financial stake the public had in its solution.

It took most of a week and a stock market plunge for the implications to sink in and for Americans who opposed the bill to reconsider. In fact, the public reaction, as measured by the mail dumped on Congress, was more angry than worried.

Some scholars, such as John Sides, an assistant professor of political science at George Washington University, think that the public’s confidence in government is not as low as some polls indicate and that its mood will bounce back once a new president is in office, despite the financial problems. Congress’ approval rating, Sides points out, is “routinely low, but it reflects ritualistic cynicism about the institution, which doesn’t translate into any specific outcome.”

Nevertheless, the new chief executive will have precious little time in which to turn things around and to convince the public that he has taken charge of the office and the nation’s problems.

A Panoply of Problems