History was made this week when Illinois Senator Barack Obama was elected as the first African American president of the United States. Not only was that an important milestone, but our country will also see a shift after eight years, from a Republican President to a Democratic one.

But now that the Presidential race is over, there are monumental challenges facing the new President Elect. Barack Obama now has to turn all the promises and a hope of “change” into reality. Are all the economic reforms we heard time and time again from Obama really doable? The facts are that he will face a steep uphill fight against a non-stop barrage of bad economic news, not only here in the U.S. but around the world.

It’s a fairly unanimous consensus that our economy is in a deep recession, to the likes we haven’t seen in over 70 years. What’s important now is to keep the economy resilient. There appears to be a strong movement for more government regulation, driven by the deep problems in credit and housing markets. What’s important is that any new regulations do what they are intended to do and not make matters worse by choking off any natural recovery and limiting our flexibility to make needed adjustments.

It’s a natural reaction to protect the home base and look out for American companies as the world economy shrinks. But we really need to be careful with our trade policy and again, not over react. It would be a mistake to over protect U.S. companies so that none of them fail. Selling goods and/or services that nobody wants because they are overpriced or of poor quality should naturally lead a company to be acquired or just allowed to go out of business.

Government can’t step in every time and bail any failing company out. Let business and general economics run its course. The strong companies will survive and flourish and drive our economy to recovery. Weak and failing companies should only be saved for strategic reasons. But throwing a government lifeline of hard-earned taxpayer dollars to a company that may squander the opportunity or fail anyways, is not good business sense nor common sense.

The challenges are enormous. The new administration must be smart and plan their attack to optimize the return for the whole economy. Let’s put politics and favoritism aside, and do the right thing for a change. The new administration to be led by Barack Obama made many promises such as “change”, so let’s now see what he can actually deliver.