The first week

A week ago today, Barack Obama strode onto the stage at the U.S. Capitol building and swore to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States.

It was an historic moment as the nation's first African American followed the footsteps of 42 white men before him and became president. Officially, he is the 44th president of the United States (Grover Cleveland was the 22nd and 24th), and already his term is off to a productive start.

On his first day on the job last Tuesday, he delivered his Inaugural Address, dined with members of Congress, walked down part of Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, presided over the Inaugural Parade in his honor, attended 10 Inaugural balls and declared a National Day of Renewal and Reconciliation.

By Friday, he had issued executive orders maintaining presidential records, setting up new ethics rules, creating new interrogation standards and closing the Guantánamo detention center in Cuba.

Those orders set the new president on a starkly different course from his predecessor, a point the Obama campaign had emphasized repeatedly throughout the election cycle. But it wasn't just executive orders. The president also rescinded the Bush-Reagan "Mexico City Policy" which had prohibited organizations that receive federal funds from using those funds "to pay for the performance of abortions as a method of family planning." Unlike his predecessors, who had each changed the policy back and forth, Obama chose to make his announcement after the anniversary of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

President Obama also set up a process for greater transparency in government, opened up the Freedom of Information Act for greater public access to federal records and froze top salaries in the White House.

And that was just by Friday.

By Saturday, he had delivered the first ever weekly presidential address by video, which was also shown on the new White House YouTube page.

By Monday, the president had secured three of the top four spots in his cabinet when the Senate confirmed Tim Geithner to be his Treasury Secretary. Hillary Clinton had been confirmed after the Inauguration and Obama made his first visit to a cabinet department to welcome her. With Robert Gates already securely in place as Defense Secretary, Obama needed only the confirmation of Attorney General designate Eric Holder to complete his top-level cabinet.

Obama also spoke about his own Muslim connections, something the campaign largely avoided last year: "I have Muslim members of my family. I have lived in Muslim countries," Obama said.

Holder, the highest African American appointee in the Obama administration, was still in limbo on Tuesday morning as some Republicans worried that his hard line on torture in his confirmation hearings might be used to prosecute former Bush administration officials for war crimes.

The Holder news, along with Obama's visit to the State Department before he visited the Pentagon, sent signals to Washington insiders that the president was adopting a new approach to international diplomacy that might be more comfortable to U.S. allies and former enemies. In one final sign, the new president extended an olive branch to the Muslim world by giving his first television interview not to a U.S. media outlet but to an Arab one, Al Arabiya.

"All too often the United States starts by dictating -- in the past on some of these issues -- and we don't always know all the factors that are involved," Obama told al-Arabiya. "So let's listen," he said.

Obama also spoke about his own Muslim connections, something the campaign largely avoided last year. "The United States has a stake in the well-being of the Muslim world, that the language we use has to be a language of respect," the president said, adding, "I have Muslim members of my family. I have lived in Muslim countries." That alone marked a dramatic change in U.S. branding to the world.

Still, despite all the activity of the past week, the big news remained the economy. President Obama and members of Congress continued to wrangle over the proposed $825 billion stimulus package in the House as some leading Republicans in both chambers vowed to oppose the bill unless more tax cuts were added.

With the country in dire straits and the president's approval higher than any new president since Kennedy, the economy may be Obama's biggest challenge in meeting expectations, and it may also provide his greatest opportunity to make bold new change.