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Over the past two years Barack Obama has often quoted Martin Luther King’s words as he promised to “act with the fierce urgency of now”. In the coming days he will begin to make such rhetoric reality.

President Bush, his bags packed, will travel the short distance down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol with his successor this morning. There, shortly after noon, Mr Obama will raise his right hand to take the oath of office.

As he delivers his speech, vans will be waiting nearby to take up to 20 of Mr Obama’s senior aides to their new offices in the White House while 60 household staff race to move the new First Family’s personal possessions into their living quarters.

Mr Obama, however, will spend his first few hours as president with his focus fixed on the rituals of inaugurations: parades, banquets and no less than ten official inaugural balls – the last of which is due to end at 3am. The “new dawn of American leadership” that he heralded on the night of his election victory will not break properly until tomorrow.

Months of planning has gone into preparations for his first weeks, when a new president’s popularity and power to overcome opposition is at its peak. During a 77-day transition, Mr Obama largely took control of the economic agenda while leaving foreign affairs to Mr Bush. Tomorrow, the new President will begin taking steps to address problems at home and abroad.

Mr Obama’s schedule for “Day 1” includes meetings with his economic and national security teams to discuss his planned stimulus package, as well as the next steps for the unfinished wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Aides say that he will fulfil a campaign promise that “on my first day in office, I will bring the Joint Chiefs of Staff in, and I will give them a new mission” to end the Iraq war. The Pentagon has drawn up plans to withdraw combat brigades within the 16-month timetable proposed by Mr Obama and redeploy many to Afghanistan.

The new President is expected to issue an executive order calling for the closure of the Guantánamo Bay prison camp and forbidding the use of interrogation techniques denounced widely as torture. Both issues have done much to tarnish America’s reputation, but Mr Obama has said that the final closure of Guantánamo is “a challenge” and unlikely to be completed within his first 100 days. In the Middle East, where Israel’s invasion of Gaza has passed without significant comment from Mr Obama, his senior adviser promises that “you’ll see him act quickly”. David Axelrod said: “The President-elect has said repeatedly that he intends to engage early and aggressively with diplomacy all over the world.”

Dennis Ross, one of the top diplomats in Bill Clinton’s administration, is expected to become an envoy covering the Middle East including Iran. George Mitchell, a former senator, may also play a significant part in kick-starting peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians.

The top priority will, however, be the economy. Mr Obama has already persuaded Congress to give him authority to spend the second half of a $700 billion bailout package and financial institutions will come under pressure to help homeowners and release money for investment.

Mr Axelrod said: “He is going to have a strong message for the bankers. We want to see credit flowing again. We don’t want them to sit on any money that they get from taxpayers.” The new President is close to getting a deal on an economic recovery plan worth upwards of $825 billion, including a massive public works programmes and tax cuts that are intended to stimulate spending.

Within his first days after taking office, he is expected to sign legislation expanding healthcare for children from poor families while using his executive authority to overturn President Bush’s ban on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research.

Other promises are likely to fall further back in the queue. “I want to be realistic here, not everything that we talked about during the campaign are we going to be able to do on the pace we had hoped,” Mr Obama said in a interview last week.

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