Obama, Bush prepare for first post-election meeting

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
Barack Obama heads to the White House for his first postelection meeting with President George W. Bush this week, as Americans await signals of how their new leader will confront the overwhelming array of challenges facing the United States. While the president-elect vowed on Friday to make a second economic stimulus package his first order of business after he takes office in January, unemployment climbed to the highest level in more than a decade. The US stock market continued wobbling on a mainly downward trajectory, home prices continued sinking and global challenges did not abate. To that end, Obama spoke Saturday with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev part of an ongoing series of telephone dialogues with world leaders, whose actions going forward will play heavily on the next president's ability to concentrate on US domestic concerns from taxes, to health care, to vast spending on restructuring energy policy even as the federal government hemorrhages money to prop up the nation's crumbling financial infrastructure. After speaking with Medvedev, a Kremlin statement said Obama and the Russian leader "expressed the determination to create constructive and positive interaction for the good of global stability and development" and agreed that their countries had a common responsibility to address "serious problems of a global nature."