Is that what the country needs? A nudge? Oh great, is the Democratic Party actually nominating a person who can turn this country around, or someone who wants to play amateur psychologist and experiment with us?

HERE IS WHAT OBAMA DOESN'T GET AND THE MAJORITY OF DEMOCRATS WHO FAWN OVER HIM HAVEN'T FIGURE OUT:

Obama's change IS NOT THE CHANGE THOSE DEMOCRATS THINK IT IS AND THEY BEST BE ASKING HIM WHAT EXACTLY HE INTENDS TO DO!

And Obama is MISTAKEN IF HE THINKS HIS 50% SUPPORT OF ABOUT 23% OF THE COUNTRY'S VOTERS IS GIVING HIM THE GO-AHEAD TO PLAY RADICAL GAMES WITH OUR COUNTRY'S DIRECTION.

The Obama campaign has been the most intellectually dishonest charade that has popped up in a long, long time.

Run, run...as fast as you can away from this guy.

Think of a driver on the freeway. Every five seconds, he opens his eyes for a quick peek, and then corrects his course. His driving will be very jerky.

Now think of how you normally drive: constant small adjustments. Nudges.

Even if Obama does have to take some dramatic action to dodge a crisis, he should still focus on implementing a lot of thoughtful little nudges, as that's how you avoid a lot of crises in the first place.

... in the field (with few exceptions). Other economists belong to schools of thought and behave like ideologues, describing any behavior that does not fit their models as "irrational". The behaviorists, on the other hand, study what people actually do, and test their predictions by experiment.

It's not simply a matter of a political middle ground. It's a completely different approach, where you don't claim that a strategem will work without data to back it up. You don't rely on holy works, whether by Milton Friedman or Karl Marx.

Obama is just what we need. We need someone to sofly and palatably move us in a better direction.

All the shovers manage to do is to alienate and polarize. HRC and her over-the-top original health plan is an example. Sometimes it doesn't pay to be right, if everyone hates you and noone will do what you say.

Obama is not a shover and not a polarizer. He makes people feel good about change which is a miracle given our status-quo oriented society. Even his mandate-less health care proposals show his genius, since his proposals are less scary to some folks who loath mandates and are therefor ten million times more likely to be realized than HRC's arguably sounder, but less likely proposals.

Introducing an effective mechanism for achieving worthy goals would be a lasting legacy. If these nudges work where shoves have failed then Obama will have plenty to hang his hat on. It may be subtle and even escape the notice of the chattering class, but using cutting edge ideas to effect positive political and social change would be pretty amazing, at least to me.

Anyone who thinks any President, short of God himself, can implement radical policies that actually cure what ails us without pain is a lunatic and should be ignored. There are three imposibilitites in that vain hope. Can you name all three?

Cryin out loud, I try to write a little fluff, and my typos flatten my fluff.

I say the U in Nudge is like the U in Put and Pudding.

I believe it probably is rhyme Nudge with Judge and Fudge. And it certainly is wrong to rhyme Nudge with Stooge.

A national health plan that is at least virtually universal will be a lasting legacy -- and given the sheer drag on employment that it's absence causes, a major economic one at that.

If says something or nothing it's all the same brilliance to them. So the whole discussion is rather besides the point. At the end of the day, it all turns into the government telling the middle class to take it in the neck for the poor and therefore become poor themselves.

" If the next Democratic president wants to leave a truly lasting legacy, he or she will have to do more than nudge the country in a different direction."

As noted here previously, the desire to avoid economic downturns and deal with structural problems such as government spending binges and trade deficits during the Greenspan era and the Bush Administration has lead in great part to our current woes. Printing lots of money, selling piles of government bonds, and keeping interest rates low is an economic heroin and meth speedball concoction. The fact that it was a legal prescription written by the Fed, the Congress and the Executive leaves us no less addicted.

It's probably unrealistic to expect to break this addiction without enduring the shakes, and it's really unrealistic to expect we can continue as is without further deterioration.

There should be no question that in the next few years nudges will need to become shoves.

Things are going to get really ugly out there.

I don't mind a President who starts with a subtle approach to economics as long as he isn't afraid to turn up the heat when it's required. Obama is obviously not timid (you don't run this kind of campaign at age 46 with only a partial first term in the US Senate if you're afraid to be bold.)

We should look to the cues of the impressive organization of his campaign to get a look at how he will manage the nation. Everybody watching this campaign has been impressed with the approach and execution. He has defeated the established candidate with the most famous name in Democratic politics. He has energized more than a million campaign donors. He will bring these same skills to the White House to great effect.

Clinton supports a plan (Gas Tax Holiday) that might have been part of her 'moving quickly to the Left' but there is a behavioral result as well. This plan would NUDGE Americans to drive more this summer, increasing our dependency on foreign oil and hurting our environment while putting even greater pressure on gas prices. None of these behaviors or results are consistent with anything someone on the Left should support.

I'm happy that there is a candidate thinking about how Americans might behave in the future as a result of a potential policy. I'll take this over Clinton's 'how many votes will I get for supporting this?' approach any day of the week.

It's amazing that throughout this campaign, Obama has been cast as a man of rhetorical skills with limited substance. In fact, his rhetoric is so powerful precisely because there is so much evidence of the thought behind it.