And, as the new CEO of General Motors, what will his policy be on corporate compensation? Will the public tolerate his letting his new company pay salaries sufficient to attract the talent necessary to salvaging the firm? Or will he have to rely on a bunch of kids right out of school, willing to work for one or two hundred thousand a year, for the company's salvation?

When it comes to the hard work of cutting retiree health benefits, reducing salaries, laying off workers and closing plants, is Obama willing to resist calls for his intervention? Is he up for getting the blame for all the "heartless" measures GM will have to take to salvage its future? He has put himself squarely in a position to pay a steep political price for his assumption of power in GM.

Most troubling is the sense that Obama cannot have thought this through. He can't have planned this. President Clinton used to say at strategy meetings that we needed to think three or four moves ahead and not just "kick the can down the road." Obama is clearly not following his predecessor's advice.

He realized GM needed money. He knew the public would have a fit if he gave it. So he decided that he would appease his electorate by exacting blood from the company's management and directors by using his guillotine on some of its old grey heads.

But, had he thought before he acted, he would have realized that it would have been far better to have criticized GM from a distance even as he extended more money rather than to, in effect, take over the company.

The president's protestations that the government does not want to own a car company are quite beside the point. It's his now, and he better figure out what to do with it.