Although I am an Obama supporter and wish him well, I just don't get his desire to appease and even cater to the "free market" approach to everything. The free market only fosters greed and the bending of the law to subvert its intent. To hell with the dittoheads. We NEED government regulation and oversight built into anything that the government either pays for directly, or subsidizes indirectly. Otherwise the the Bushies will continue to loot the Treasury to line their own pockets

You need to push him!

Let's not forget the miserable condition that 8+ years of corrupt, illegal Republican rule has left us.

Imagine driving a car with no oil changes or maintenance for 200,000 miles and expecting a mechanic to fix the engine with chewing gum and rubber bands.

In effect, that is what too many are expecting of Obama. They want change but they fear what is necessary to accomplish it.

The President just signed an Executive Order enabling Directive 10-289. Happy Now?

The responses to this article are quite depressing. Perhaps Lind should have started out by stating the obvious - that we should be grateful John Mcain is not now supervising the economy. But Lind's substantive point - that direct management / ownership by the government of certain sectors and industries may be more efficient than employing private sector middlemen and market mechanisms to try and achieve the same outcomes has been overlooked. Instead we get tedious rhetoric about Lind's points being 'old solutions' with not a hint of empirical or logical argument as to why these are 'old' solutions. It's almost Orwellian. The Chicago ideologues have clearly done their job well.

E.g: Lind makes / implies the point that were the government to invest directly in solar panel research and construction it might bring down the absolute cost of making solar panels, whereas trying to 'nudge' resources into solar via various tax incentives may be less effective at changing absolute costs than the direct method, due to tricky accounting by companies, duplication of efforts, etc. This is an empirical question not a sign of Lind's senility, so give his article a fair hearing!

Any more Grimm fairy tales? You schmucks will never learn, so take a hike and don't look back.

Michael Lind's article is excellent — and surprising, given his apparent willingness to take Clinton head on for his greatest failing as a policymaker.

There are a few points where Lind is Lind, and takes breathtaking liberties in defense of his larger point. For instance, utilities have always been quasi-public entities in this country, today no less than a century ago and probably with more public accountability. Mass transit was much more privatized than it is today. And two of the greatest public works projects of our era — the worldwide internet and the global GPS system — were absolutely of the most old-school high liberal order.

But Lind's greater sin — though truly, still, a venal one — may be that he casts his net too narrowly.

Why, after all, are liberal politicians so tepid? Why is there no real left wing in American politics anymore? The answer is simply that for 30 years the people of this country have abandoned liberalism for tepid centrism, and their elected representatives simply, inevitably, tragically reflect that choice.

The unavoidable fact of the matter is that privatization and deregulation were popular. Granted, they may have only been so because so many liberals ceded the discursive ground to Reaganomic deceits, but in the end what is there to say about it except that it was always the people's choice as to what they would accept or reject?

When we got tired of it, finally, we all just upped and picked a new guy. That's all it took. We could have done it in 2004, we could have done it in 2000 or 1988 or 1980. At any time.

And as Lind very correctly points out, for all that we talk big, our revolution is still pretty modest. Obama has hardly proven a shaker-upper like Roosevelt.

The thing is, though, neither he nor anyone else will ever be unless we demand it. Conversely, then, if he's not ... well, you do the math.

For those who paid attention to what he said during the primaries, it shouldn't be news that Obama is not a liberal.

If anything, Barack Obama is a pragmatist extraordinaire. He will do what is practical, not what is perfect or Utopian. This is what has the liberal and progressive community disappointed and concerned.

I actually understand some of his thinking; I think a lot of other average Americans also understand and appreciate his thinking.

First, there is no way in today's U.S. supercharged private and nonprofit enterprise system to do what Lind suggests - publicizing private and nonprofit entities to make them either more efficient or less expensive. They are too deeply embedded into the works and our economy would collapse if Obama were to undertake such a route.

What do you think would happen, for example, if Obama called for a full public sector healthcare program that was paid for by taxes or surcharges? Too many primary health care providers and hospitals, as well as secondary health care providers would go out of business.

Fifty or sixty years ago, a fully public healthcare system, education system or energy system was possible because private enterprise as we know it today wasn't the behemoth we have -- embedded into every corner of this country and across the world. We also didn't have a global economy, so closely linked to our banking and financial system.

Second, there is no reason that public-private partnerships - in healthcare, energy, education, services, for example - can't work and be effective if there is effective oversight and enforcement of rules of the road.

Additionally, we don't get from capitalism-on-steroids to a fully public system in one, two or three leaps and Obama, I think, understands this in a way that progressives/liberals do not (or do not want to).

That he is moving so swiftly and aggressively to change the mindset is, to me, a good sign of the right direction. As he has noted: Change won't happen overnight. And for those who believe he is practicing "timid liberalism", it's the long view that matters. Obama gets that.