Aside from taking the tone of one of his speeches, I would say that President Obama is making good on the goals laid out by a lot of people on the left who aspired to be president before him. We've heard a lot of talk about closing overseas tax loopholes for big corporations and shifting wealth down towards the middle, but I never thought there'd be a day when I'd actually see priorities like that outlined in a budget. Andrew is right. Obama is holding the feet of the oligarchs to the fire with his mantra of responsibility. If I read the bare outlines of this budget correctly and if even half of it gets passed, our country will be put on a sustainable path once again. And if the noises coming from the right recently are any indication (like Bobby Jindal's rebuttal speech), the GOP is about to lose its core moral argument: that government is always bad, always gets it wrong and that the Free Market is our only salvation. This is a decided shift in another direction. It also shows that the tall, skinny black guy with the funny sounding name in the White House has got serious stones.

Dick Cheney is angry. He's a really angry guy. That must explain why he seethes and growls when he speaks and why he has such significant heart trouble. He's angry that all his paranoid delusions didn't become the official culture of the United States, despite his best efforts and that his distant cousin (if media accounts are to be believed), the new president with the funny sounding not-American name means to turn all that fascism back. He's just so ANGRY.

I did not know that.

Imagine my shock.

Well, this certainly explains a lot.

Someone on "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" noted that the Obama team seems to be playing a "longer game." If that's true that would be something new in Washington politics, where it's all about sound bytes and surviving news cycles. The daily spin war as Mike Madden suggested here. A little more than 3 weeks into the Obama era and it looks like the new president has built up an impressive head of steam. He has huge public support, he's made the Republicans look like the obstructionists that they are (no matter how much they insist they're being "principled"), and he's about to get a major piece of legislation passed and signed that might actually do some good for the country. That's pretty darned impressive by any standard, and the reason is that, unlike Bush's "talk to the hand" approach, he kept the focus exactly where it needs to be: on all of US who don't live and work in Washington and breathe that left over Rovian stale air of cynicism and jaded ideology.

I don't think Mr. Kamiya is completely wrong when he states that President Obama needs to confront failed conservative ideology in a forceful fashion and repudiate it entirely. But I also don't think that Obama was praising Ronald Reagan's presidency, as Gary contends. It is a very obvious fact that the Reagan era did change the trajectory of the country in a way that Clinton did not. At least not completely. Clinton's excesses mitigated the effect of his basically sound approach to governing and gave the GOP an opening to retake power and finish their objective, which was to create a corporatocracy armed to the teeth and essentially marginalize government. Clinton's presidency was effective, but in the end, a missed opportunity.

W. Bush's presidency was the nightmare we awoke into: paranoid fantasy as foreign policy, and blinkered, cold indifference as domestic policy with a healthy dollop of arrogance, stupidity, and incompetence. After extremes on both sides, Obama seems to be attempting to learn from the mistakes of both. It's interesting to watch as he tries to thread the needle and forge a vital center above both. You have to give him credit for trying at least. I also disagree that Obama is incapable of fighting back. I think he's done that at key points in the campaign and now in this stimulus fight. What's maddening is that he waits longer than we would like to finally insert himself into the conflict. Yet when he does, the results are usually disastrous for his opponents. The GOP are patting themselves on the back for scoring cheap political points in a battle they ultimately are going to lose. Add to which, if the polls are right, they look rather foolish to the rest of us at a time when the nation is in big trouble. So it seems that Obama's approach is to allow his opposition to make complete asses of themselves, and it appears to be working. By doing so, they discredit themselves in the eyes of most Americans and marginalize themselves where only the real cranks will listen to them. Much as it may be Obama's job to continue to educate the public about why the conservative approach does not work, it's equally incumbent on us not to forget the lessons of recent history and not let our children forget.