President Obama unveils a homeowner-assistance package today, a day after GM and Chrylser filed their restructuring plans and sought $21 billion in new aid. 

The plan for dealing with homeowners struggling to pay mortgages could in an instant reverse a lot of the psychology of fear that has gripped many people --if the terms of the plan are clear and the promise of timely assistance is specific and believable.  Simple, direct explanations of who is eligible for what would be a wonderful change from the many plans over the past year that few understood and fewer used.  Anything that helps build the bottom on housing powers the recovery.  But a repeat of last week's ambiguity about the banks will add another layer of evidence to the president's growing reputation for overpromising and underdelivering.

With the car companies, a quick decision to throw in with them or cut them off is much preferred to a long round of deliberations prior to a bankruptcy filing.  Again, we don't need another Hamlet-like performance bemoaning how awful it all is and how it is going to take superhuman effort etc.  Get on with it.  Quickly.

With Brian Wesbury and others, I expect the recovery to arrive sooner and with more energy than most, but I also believe the starting gun has to go off in millions of minds via clear government signals about the rules of the road.  The stimulus was a botched attempt to deliver such a signal because a sophisticated public understood it to be an exercise in rewarding constituencies of the Democratic Party, not a growth measure. 

Assistance to homeowners and the car companies are much more clearly non-political interventions and could earn GOP support in Congress --provided the Administration's proposals don't attempt to pick winners and losers based upon voting patterns, and provided that the UAW shares in the pain of the restructuring.  President Obama gets a second chance to fashion a bipartisan approach to part of the economic problems, and we should hope he doesn't whiff again.