Romney's ambitious agenda for first day in office won't be easy to achieve Then: Allow states to escape parts of the health-care law (if it still exists). Rewrite the way all federal regulations are issued. Call out China for cheating on international trade. And somewhere in there find time for all the solemn rigmarole that actually makes a president a president. An oath. A speech. A parade. Some mandatory dancing. Mitt Romney isn't president yet, of course. He's not even his party's nominee, though that appears to be a virtual certainty now that his main challenger, Rick Santorum, has suspended his campaign. But already, the candidate has laid out an ambitious 10-part to-do list for "day one" in the White House - a preview of the kind of president Romney wants to be. In it, he imagines himself as a fast-moving executive, bold in his conservatism, with a businessman's eye on the bottom line. The big day one (or two or three) list is something of a campaign tradition, a way to underline your priorities and show where your predecessor went astray. In the first three days after his inauguration, President Obama announced orders freezing the pay of his senior staff; rescinding the "Mexico City policy," a ban on foreign aid to groups that provide abortions; and ordering the closure of the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba - a promise that he has yet to fulfill more than three years later. Similarly, Romney's first-day agenda is not as easily achieved as he suggests - either on day one, or, perhaps, ever. Some of his ideas seem predestined to run aground on Capitol Hill. Others could unspool huge new hassles in the federal bureaucracy. "He's going to discover that it is diluted a lot, because there's a thing called a Congress and there's a thing called a Supreme Court," said Tom Korologos, who helped four Republican presidents - Nixon, Ford, Reagan and George H.W. Bush - work with Capitol Hill. What could Romney expect on his first day? Korologos thought of something President Harry S. Truman said about the incoming President Eisenhower, who was used to a general's power: "He'll sit here, and he'll say, "Do this! Do that! And nothing will happen. Still, for now, Romney insists that he can do it all. "A lot's gonna have to happen quickly, because a new president gets elected and there's a great deal of interest and willingness on the part of Congress and the Senate," Romney said last weekend to supporters in Muskego, Wis. Let me tell you some things I'd do on day one . . . From there, Romney talked for a full five minutes. And he got through only five of the items on his jam-packed agenda. On day one, for instance, Romney says he would submit a series of policy ideas to Congress - then "demand" that legislators act on them within a deadline of 30 days. One of these is the proposal to reduce the corporate income tax, from 35 percent to 25 percent. That's already a popular idea - in theory. The GOP-controlled House wants a cut. President Obama wants one, too, although just to 28 percent.