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The Bush presidency has seen one disaster after another, with the current economic disintegration as the final outrage. President-elect Obama is walking into a house that is burning down.
Our new president is a brilliant man with a spectacular education who is clearly able to see what he is up against. I don't believe he has jettisoned his core beliefs. Rather, it seems he realizes that without stabilizing the foundations of our society, there will be nothing he can do to achieve them.
The people he has chosen to help him govern are admittedly not the fresh young faces his most fervent supporters hoped to see, but what is common to them all is that they know what they're doing and don't need to be trained. My assessment of his choice of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State is that, despite the friction of the past, she is completely prepared to manage foreign relations and keep a great deal of pressure off of the new President while he attends to the calamity at home. The members of his domestic team are not "holdovers". They are veterans, combat tested and sure of themselves, and will be organized by an aggressive Chief of Staff who will keep everything in line like a drill sargent.
Barack Obama deserves out trust and patience. His moves toward the political center are meant to recruit as much consensus as possible for the tasks immediately at hand. Once accomplished, his progressive agenda will move forward.
