I can understand why your enthusiasm for Obama is in retrograde. McCain/Palin would have been Soooo much better.

That said, the criticism of Obama is correct and needs to be there. He'll do what the pressure is on him to do. AFTER he gets universal health care of some kind passed and implementation started, I will be right there along with the other critics keeping his feet to the fire. But there is a certain realism to governing that is not there when candidates are making promises.

And Obama has only been in office four months. How much can he reverse after Rove/Cheney and company have had eight years to screw stuff up? And sometimes, who knows? They might have even gotten a few things right.

Effective Presidents don't do very much by direct fiat. Instead they prepare a vision of change and a goal, then set the process of change going. That takes time, and a lot of trial and error.

Down in the trenches, the workers do pretty much what they were doing before the new President arrived until the process of change gets to their level. It takes a good deal of time for that to happen because of all the coordination that has to occur at higher levels first.

That probably explains the DoJ doing things the Bush way. The changes simply haven't gotten down to the actual attorneys who are preparing and presenting briefs yet. Every big organization works that why, and the bigger it is, the slower changes can be made. There is no bigger organization that the US Federal government.

The only way to make massive changes quickly is to create a new agency, something that FDR did a number of times. But now that government is so much larger, there is little room for new agencies. Besides, a new agency requires Congressional action and funding, which is itself very slow. It is also not easily controlled by anyone, the President, Congressional leaders, or anyone else.

So I am delighted that Obama has promised to make the single most important change in the federal government - bring universal national health care financing into existence. I expect to have to wait on a lot of the rest of it to change.

At least Obama knows about this and is doing it right. Bush simply looked at the problems, threw up his hands and either handed it off to Cheney or Rove or he went on vacation and cut brush. That's the mechanism the conservatives rail against when they complain about civil servants sabotaging the changes they want to make. But those conservatives come from much smaller organizations and don't understand the strengths and limitations of very large ones, especially the federal government. Worse, they have no respect for the government and don't bother to learn how to function with it.

That's why most businesspersons-turned-politicians fail in what they try to get government to do. Even when they do learn, adapt and succeed it takes quite a while.

Thank you for the detailed and careful post. You've given me a lot to think about.

As to where we differ, I think we differ on just how much Obama CAN do. Just because there are so many things desperately in need of being done after the destruction left by three decades of conservatives out to destroy America as a modern developed nation, and particularly after the rather strange mix of ignorance and corruption that has characterized the Bush administration over the last eight years.

I consider Obama quite limited in his freedom to act. If he tries to change a lot of things right now, he is just going to build up his opponents and they will shut him down. So from what I can see, everything is being focused on getting Health care passed this year while he is still "fresh" and while the atrocities of the Bush administration remain on voter's minds.

The problem is that the separation of powers in the Constitution gives a lot of power to Congress, but the public imagination gives the President monarchial power. He simply does not have it, as Clinton found out when he tried to pass the desperately needed health care plan.

So Obama is setting out his goals - mostly the ones he campaigned on - and handing the ball to Congress to do what he asked their way. That is his way of finessing the problem that Bill Clinton had with passing health care. Obama has to have the barons of the Congress committed strongly enough so that they cannot be bought off by the Lobbyists or absolutely nothing will happen (a win for the lobbyists.)

Obama also has so many plates in the air right now that the headline from Harry Reid is probably correct. He failed to focus on what he wanted Congress to do in closing down Gitmo. Congress went their own way, and the money was removed in order to give Obama a signal regarding who has the power to make things happen or to stop them. DADT is something that Obama could simply declare, but if he did, it would lead to other defeats as the Gays in the Military issue did for Bill Clinton.

From what I can see, it appears to me that Obama has laid out a lot of things he would like to see done, but the Congressional barons, the top flag officers, and the ranking individuals at the CIA all have veto powers. Not individually, but certainly groups of them do. So he is letting them win without bringing the full weight of the Presidency down on them. They each have constituencies they have to please, too. But for health care, Obama has Reid and Pelosi working to get it, and together they are weakening the biggest potential roadblocks.

Reid faces the same problem as Obama with the filibuster and the insane Republicans who refuse to govern but just want power. Pelosi has more leeway, but not a lot. Those three are marshalling the power to get health care, which is what I saw when the health care issue became a budget issue not subject to the filibuster. The most likely Blue Dog and moderate Republicans are being bought off or weakened politically. Bought off by giving them wins on issues before health care so that they can take those wins home to their constituents, and weakened by making it expensive to be out front in the fight against health care. Nothing that comes up before health care can be turned into a battle royal, since that would automatically strengthen Obama's opponents when health care gets to the Congress and the crunch time.

The last thing to remember is that the economy could and probably should have dived to Depression levels. That scared Paulson and Bernanke enough to make them do things by now they never would have done, and Obama stood on their shoulders to get the stimulus passed. That stimulus and the extra money that the Fed has been kicking into the economy have (temporarily?) saved our butts for right now. Unfortunately, it has also taken a lot of pressure off the voting public. They just see the amazing levels of debt it is taking and don't see the alternatives where we have so far missed the bullet.

Of all the threats to Obama's ability to get anything done, especially health care, I see that last one as the biggest. The result is that I don't think he has any ability right now to do anything except health care. Everything else is running on autopilot while Obama carefully avoids making himself a target.

That looks highly unliberal, but in fact it Obama can reverse three quarters of a century of getting nothing through and succeeds getting universal health care of some kind passed, he has an opportunity to show his true colors after that. I think he'll be in the position to actually demonstrate what a powerful President can do.

I also don't think I have ever seen another President who was as aware of all this since LBJ. LBJ had two major goals, Medicare and Civil Rights, and Westmoreland in Vietnam knew that. So he demanded a quarter million more troops. If LBJ had not given them to him, the conservatives would have shut him down, so he did it. I don't think that Carter had a clue regarding these Presidential dynamics. Clinton, for all his brilliance, walked into the buzz saw left by Bush 41 in Somalia and in gays in the military, so that by the time Health care came up he was badly weakened. Then he did not understand Congress and Health care got killed.

It's my impression that Obama is one of the finest strategic managers I have every observed, and I spent eight years studying corporate strategic management. I'm also 66 years old and have read the news as well as history in depth for all my adult life. I'm not a politician, but I know enough to look for power sources that you can use and power sources that can block you. So this is my best estimate as a distant observer regarding what is happening in Washington right now.

So I think our disagreement is based on what we each think that Obama can and should be doing right now. I really think he has to focus on health care to have a hope in Hell of getting it, and the result of that limitation is that he is going to look quite illiberal for now. Harry Reid, also, since Reid is the man who is most directly responsible for getting stuff through the Senate around the filibuster. Obama is going to be Harry's big guns in reserve when it comes to the crunch, and neither of them can waste their power before then. No matter who it disappoints right now.

KateO, you are amazing in the way you hurl insults, but you fall far short of presenting any substantial arguments or addressing any questions presented to you. I guess you just like getting your name mentioned in the blogs. THAT you can read, but you seem to have missed everything in print pertaining to the facts. Read, analyze, compare what you read to what Obama said throughout his campaign, then formulate an argument. That's how it's done. you don't really come across as a learned person simply by saying an opponent is having a tantrum. Face your opponent and present a cogent argument for your side. If you can't do that, then perhaps you'd be happy if someone simply did the following: KateO, KateO, KateO, KateO, KateO. Is that enough to satisfy you?