The Time of Reckoning (NY Times)

[jefferson_dem]

The Time of Reckoning

If we have had doubts about the way President Obama has been handling the multitudinous disasters bequeathed to him by George W. Bush, starting with the cascading economic crisis, it was that we wanted to see more of Barack Obama the candidate in Barack Obama the president. He has not been assertive, ambitious, clear — or audacious — enough.

Mr. Obama’s first speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night was his chance to change that, and he rose to the occasion. He sounded confident — promising that the nation will rebuild and “emerge stronger than before” — without minimizing the grave problems that must first be surmounted.

He drew a bright line between his view of government and that of the Republicans who dominated Washington for so long: rejecting their idea that government had no role in creating the current disaster and no fundamental responsibility for fixing it.

Mr. Obama rightly said that the country’s economic problems did not “begin when the housing market collapsed or the stock market sank.”

He said the nation has long known that it needs to break its dependence on oil, reform health care and fix its schools. “And though all these challenges went unsolved, we still managed to spend more money and pile up more debt, both as individuals and through our government, than ever before,” he said.

Most important, Mr. Obama did not fall prey to the temptation to approach these problems in incremental slices. He was right to say that stimulating the economy and rescuing the nation’s banking system not only can be, but must be, accomplished at the same time as health care reform, investing in education and finding new sources of alternative energy.

Of course, not everything can be done at once. Mr. Obama was right to give the Pentagon a year to shut down the prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and he is right, while sending more troops to Afghanistan to deal with the fast-unraveling situation, to take a few months to come up with a strategy for the real, long-neglected, front against Al Qaeda.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/opinion/25wed1.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print