I could become very concerned as I read the media reports that President-Elect Obama is a reincarnation of Lincoln or the second coming of a political messiah.  OK - the election is over and your guy won.  I get that.  But how about letting the man take office and actually do something before you start writing about his performance.  It is not enough that we have elected a man, admittedly talented and charismatic, who has no track record - we want to put his Presidency into the laudatory chapters of the history books before he has even taken office.  Horsepucky.

The other side of the coin is the group of bloggers who despair for life on the planet as we know it and condemn the incoming administration to the dustbin of history prior to inauguration day.  Equally as egregious.  I would prefer that the President-Elect be allowed by both sides to take office and actually do something before we praise or condemn his performance on the job.  He certainly has a couple of major issues to address on Day 1.

President-Elect Obama brings a remarkable set of talents to the table but he faces a daunting set of problems in his first year.  He is likely to disappoint many of the core groups who voted for him fairly early in the game.  He will be constrained by events as all new administrations are.  He may be the most radical liberal since Karl Marx - or not.  We don't know that yet.  But we do know where Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid stand - and they think they are going to run the country from their end of Pennsylvania Avenue.  The President-Elect is doing what all new administrations do - filling his staff positions with folks from the previous administrations of his party who know where the light switches are at the White House.  But is a group of Clintonistas going to bring the change promised by the candidate to the landscape ? I have my doubts - but time will tell. 

Uncertainty is the bane of our system - both political and economic.  Once we know what the problem is and how we are going to overcome it, the American System is resilient and extremely capable of rising to the occasion.  But we are also prone to mass hysteria and herd mentality (note that I have not yet mentioned the word "lemmings") until we identify the leader and policies we need to follow.  The media feeds the beast with their "the sky is falling" editorial style.  We do not need a leader who will run down the stairs, jump on his horse and ride off in all directions.  Mr Obama has demonstrated, when he does not know the answer, the capacity to stand calmly with his mouth closed.  It is a talent that has served him well. 

Jonah Goldberg writing for Townhall.com today addresses these questions.  He is frequently a clear thinker and a talented writer whose point of view I have commended to you on many previous occasions.  I do so again today.  And I have drawn his closing line as the title for this post.

Enjoy.

My source: http://townhall.com/columnists/JonahGoldberg/2008/11/19/no_to_obamas_experimental_government?page=full&comments=true

Wednesday, November 19, 2008
'No' To Obama's Experimental Government
by Jonah Goldberg

On Sunday night, President-elect Barack Obama told "60 Minutes" that Franklin D. Roosevelt would be a model of sorts for him. "What you see in FDR that I hope my team can emulate is not always getting it right, but projecting a sense of confidence and a willingness to try things and experiment in order to get people working again."

This is a problematic standard. What do you want in a surgeon? One who "gets it right" or one who projects "a sense of confidence?" Ditto accountants, defense lawyers, mechanics and bomb-disposal technicians: cocky and self-assured, or gets it right?

Before you answer that, please ask yourself what your point of view on this question was during the eight years of the Bush administration.

In short, there can be a chasm between being right and merely appearing to be right. Why anyone stakes greater value on the appearance than reality is a mystery to me.

But as Obama clearly recognizes, that was a big part of the FDR magic. FDR came into office promising "bold, persistent experimentation" -- and delivered. Raymond Moley, an early member of FDR's "brain trust," saw the New Deal for what it was. "To look upon these programs as the result of a unified plan was to believe that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter's tools, geometry books and chemistry sets in a boy's bedroom could have been put there by an interior decorator," Moley wrote later.

Yet Americans thought it was all part of a plan, even though experimentation and planning are in fact near opposites. Why? Because FDR always projected such confidence, even as he made things worse. But this isn't another column about how FDR prolonged the Depression. Been there, done that. I'd rather be forward-looking.

In fact, I want to be experimental, too. So here's my idea: Just stop.

Stop talking about bailouts and stimuli. Stop pondering ever more drastic action. Give it a rest. Let it be.

One of the main reasons there's all of this "money on the sidelines" out there among private investors is that Wall Street doesn't know what the government will do next. Will it bail out the auto industry? The insurance companies? Which taxes will go up? How far will interest rates go down? How long will the federal government own stakes in the banks? Will more stimulus checks go out? If so, how big will the deficit get?

Interventionists, bailout czars and "bold experimenters" in all parties claim to be like firefighters; they can't stop what they're doing until the fire is out. But this analogy only works if you understand the nature of the fire. If it's a credit crisis, that's one thing. If it's uncertainty, it's quite another.

And if the problem right now is uncertainty, then these aren't firefighters, they're arsonists.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson told Congress he'd spend his kitty of tax dollars on bad mortgage-backed securities. Instead, in the spirit of bold experimentation, he's spent much of it to date buying banks.

Obama insisted he had a specific plan for the economy -- but his plan seems to be to "project confidence."

The problem with this "In Obama We Trust" approach is that it makes private-sector decision-making very difficult. If your boss says he will lay off half his employees next month, but he doesn't know who yet, will you buy a new house this month?

In a time of stability and growth, government can afford bold, persistent experimentation. But in a time of uncertainty, the last thing it needs is more uncertainty. Yet Obama's confident pragmatism, like FDR's, is a threat to confidence where it matters -- among consumers, credit markets and investors.

Yes, letting GM go into bankruptcy would be scary. But a GM bailout merely kicks GM's problems down the road while spreading the fear about where Uncle Sam's big feet will land next. Besides, bankruptcy isn't the end of the world. It's the means by which bad companies restructure to fix themselves. Bailouts are the means by which governments subsidize bad companies.

The engine company in Washington has pumped more than a trillion dollars through the fire hose. It's time to turn off the spigot, not only to see where we are but to let the normal people start fixing things.

By all means, let's hope President Obama will project confidence. But maybe he should express less confidence in the government's ability to get people working again, and more in the ability of regular Americans to rise from the ashes of any hardship. In short, don't just do something, President Obama, stand there.