For Which It Stands

BOSTON — First, let’s agree it is pure media conceit to think that a president can be judged in just 100 days.

And let’s also agree that no American president has ever been confronted with so many challenges in so few days with such high expectations.

This country hasn’t seen anything like it since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

And even FDR didn’t have the global weight on his shoulders that has been thrust upon Obama. This president has not only a domestic economic crisis like FDR, but a global financial meltdown. He has not only the specter of conflict as FDR faced in Europe, but two active war fronts and one, in Afghanistan, that is starting to slip perilously over the border into Pakistan.

And Roosevelt didn’t come into the job with eight years of a previous presidency that succeeded in alienating just about every corner of the world.

There is no doubt Obama has done an extraordinary job shouldering the enormity of this moment in history. He has set a tone.

Now the harder job of governing must begin. And now more than ever is the time for the hard questions. Has Obama taken on too much too early in this presidency? In a willingness to reach out even to Iran and Cuba with an unclenched fist, has he ended up appearing weak?

In particular, we need to pose penetrating questions about Afghanistan,  which is shaping up as the Achilles’ heel of this administration. It is the place where Obama has taken on the perilous task of going after the Taliban in the impenetrable terrain, where so many empires have left so many of their own dead. Are we really ready to dig graveyards alongside the British and the Soviets?

We at GlobalPost see it as our job to relentlessly hold the president to task, particularly in the areas of foreign policy — to check out and assess everything he claims to be accomplishing. It is our mission to provide context and historical perspective, to frame the big questions for the tough issues his administration faces in Iraq and Cuba and North Korea and elsewhere.

GlobalPost launched this website just eight days before Obama’s historic inauguration on Jan. 20, and since that cold, clear day our team here in Boston and all over the world has set out to cover the world with a stellar network of 65 correspondents and columnists in 45 countries.

We first stepped out into the world with a series of reports titled For Which It Stands, a collection of 50 reports, essays and columns that posed a simple question: What does the idea of America mean to the world?

And we promised that we would keep a steady stream of reports on America and its relationship with the world throughout the first 100 days of the Obama presidency.

We were inspired to undertake this project as a way to organize our coverage of a truly global presidency, a new administration that would reach out to the world in new and unprecedented ways. And Obama has not disappointed.

His presidency and the challenges he faces are indeed global in scope and, we believe, require a global news organization to cover them.

Today, our project reaches a finale with seven dispatches from seven of our correspondents:

HDS Greenway, our lead editorial columnist, has provided expert analysis informed by historical perspective about this presidency and Obama’s success in “hitting the reset button.”

Managing Editor for Correspondents and commerce columnist Thomas Mucha has unpacked for us how Obama has done in confronting the economic crisis, and he’s presented the challenges that lie ahead.

Middle East editor Jane Arraf has provided an analysis on Obama’s proposed drawdown of troops from Iraq, while Afghanistan correspondent Jean MacKenzie has offered the ground view on the shift in focus of this administration to Afghanistan and the surge of troops that is just getting underway.

Senior editor Andrew Meldrum brings 25 years of experience as a reporter in the field in Africa to an analysis of the team the first African-American president has put in place to shape foreign policy across the continent.

The coverage also includes United Kingdom correspondent Michael Goldfarb’s take on Europe’s love affair with Obama and Nichole Sobecki‘s take on Obama’s unique challenges in Turkey.

We are a small organization compared to many big, old media outlets. We are very much a work in progress. We don’t have all the answers. But we are committed to providing the kind of journalism that we hope will help you, the viewers of our site, navigate the global issues we all face.

In our special coverage today of Obama’s first 100 days, there is a simple approach to reporting that we try to carry out every day. We call it ground truth.

It means being there on the ground to see for ourselves and let you know where rhetoric meets reality, where lofty words are calibrated against the facts on the ground.