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The scars of office turned President George W Bush's boyish looks in 2000 to ravaged ones in 2008. President Clinton's hair turned powder-white by the end of his eight-year term, and he has since undergone heart bypass surgery. With America going through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, Obama's halo of good hope is vanishing fast. During the campaign, he was broadly hailed for his ability to transcend, not just manage, difficult issues such as race. This time, he has no such option available, and manage the crisis he must - with full knowledge of the consequences of his decisions, not only on the well-being of his country, but the world. It is hard to imagine anybody in his right mind wanting to trade places with him right now.

Broadly speaking, financial crises are protracted affairs. All share similar patterns - deep and prolonged asset market collapses, profound declines in output and employment, and the explosion of the real value of government debts driven not by stimulus packages, but by inevitable collapses in tax revenue.

Two of the most read economists these days - Carmen M Reinhart of the University of Maryland and Kenneth S Rogoff of Harvard University - point out that while this current crisis strikes similarities with those of the past, it has one very significant difference: Those historical crises, with the exception of the Great Depression, were individual or regional in nature; the current crisis is global, and it will be far more difficult for many countries to grow their way out of it.

Reinhart and Rogoff assert that financial crises are historically associated with five dangerous Ds, namely "Downturns" that follow banking crises, "fiscal Deficits" due to shrinking revenue, "Debt" that follows deficits, "rating Downgrades" that follow debt, and the deadliest of the Ds - "Default", such as sovereign defaults on external debts. They urge swift implementation of policies to deal with the financial and economic issues, emphasising the precedence of speed over polish.

And speed is what Mr Obama has been trying to pursue and enforce in his stimulus policies, only to draw ire that is threatening his agenda.

Criticism from all sides has been harsh and is getting harsher. The president, his economic team and his policies have been described by Paul Krugman as "behind the curve" because they are too small and too cautious to save the economy from possible total collapse. People had hoped that Obama would usher in a new feel-good era. As this has not happened, or rather is not happening fast enough, anger has crept in. So is deepening confusion, fear, and, to a certain extent, panic. As usual, panic breeds more fear, confusion and anger - which has turned more senseless and misguided.

John McCain was angry about the 8.570 earmarks in Obama's budget. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernenke was angry about bailing out AIG. Taxpayers are angry at the prospect of their hard-earned money being used to remedy all sorts of problems they did not cause.

Taxpayers' tea parties (as in the 1773 Boston Tea Party) have sprung up across the country. Partygoers hold up signs that read "Obama … commander and thief", "Honk if you are paying my mortgage". Conservatives are calling for a united effort of like-minded comrades to "save the country by helping Obama to fail". Centrists' anger is mounting over Obama's budget and stimulus plan that is perceived by some as a war on investors, entrepreneurs, small businesses, large corporations, private equity and venture-capital funds - all the traditional engines of American economic growth.

Setting aside the Republican - "the Party of No" - opposition, Mr Obama's fellow Democrats are not exactly cooperating. The president sent his budget to Congress and invited the Democratic congressional barons to fill in the details. And so they did, at the president's own expense.

Mr Obama's plan to increase taxes on the 1.2 per cent wealthiest taxpayers, to pay for the overhauling of the nation's health care, which is in a very sorry state, was substantially capped. Cuts in subsidies to big farmers and agribusiness were cut. The president's initiative for greener America and to tackle climate change and the reliance on foreign oil faced fierce resistance from members from coal and manufacturing states.

Not only that, Mr Obama's vision on energy and healthcare were dimmed by a congressional reality check, as were his ambitious plans for education, transportation and everything else.

Things are so grim, that even one of Obama's most respected and staunchest supporters in the know, Warren Buffet, admitted that the US economy has "fallen off the cliff". The fact that his interview during a live appearance on CNBC earlier this week about the true state of American banks needed to be "translated into English" underlies the bewildering state of the country's financial affairs.

To further compound the public's bafflement, the Dow Jones and the S & P indices on Tuesday jumped through the psychological hoop, sending up-tempo securities trading across the Atlantic. The surge came after a memorandum from the chief executive of Citigroup that the bank had turned a profit in the first two months of the year, the best since the third quarter of 2007. On the same day, Ben Bernanke called for broad reforms, or rather an overhaul, of the financial regulatory system, including the level of reserve and accounting rules that govern how companies value their assets.

It was the right thing to say at the right time. But the upswing is more likely to be a tick rather than a trend.

There is one consolation to this very depressing predicament. As Reinhart and Rogoff point out, financial crises are "hardy perennials" that require constant revision and recalibration of regulations to keep up with market innovations driven by greed. Now is the chance for the US and the world to retool and reorient their economies. The success and failure of such an effort will determine if the crisis will take the form of a U shape or an L.

As Chairman Mao Tse Tung once said: "There is great chaos under heaven, and the opportunity is excellent." The key is in the "and" - the ability to rise to the challenge and triumph, not in spite of, but because of it.