Not Much Change -- Or Much Hope

Carol Platt Liebau | February 04, 2009 9:59 AM

What with the pork-laden "stimulus" bill and the troubled Obama nominations, the public has reason to suspect that there's not as much "change" in the Obama presidency as they had been led to expect.

Well, ditto for "hope." Obama's Energy Secretary is making dire predictions about the impact of global warming on California food sources.

It will be interesting to see how all of this sits with the electorate. Sometimes it's possible to frighten people into new policies. But my sense is that this strategy works effectively only in relatively good times.

These are tough times. What people want from their President and his administration isn't expressions of alarm at the state of the economy. It's a little optimism and can-do spirit, backed by a real plan that's actually designed to stimulate economic activity, rather than simply pay off Democrat interest groups.

Jimmy Carter tried the pursed-lip, doom-and-gloom "truth telling" method already (he seems to share a lot of Obama's foreign policy instincts, too). We see how that worked out for him. Is it "back to the future" time?