Look at the opening leaders in the current print edition of The Economist.  The first asks our President Obama, repeatedly, to descend into the fray and start telling us what we need to do about our domestic policy (health care) disaster.  The second, ditto, on the perennial foreign policy question of the Middle East.  His speech making (in Cairo) is lauded, but like the openly stated in the first article, the subtext here is that speech time is over.  The second article brings it live in the finish "Now he must add the details and start banging heads together."

So here is my question:  Is Barack Obama a professor or a president?  In his Harper's piece, "Barack Hoover Obama: the best and the brightest blow it again", Kevin Baker feels that the paradigm shift is not likely.  Hoover is neither well nor accurately represented in our national mythology (he was a smart and generous man), except the part about him not getting it done.  He stayed with the prevailing wisdom.  The fixer was Roosevelt, who didn't care what was done before and didn't conform to his paradigm or the the other talking heads in it.  He is known as a traitor to his class because he eschewed his training, took up his street smarts, and kept trying new ways to achieve the goals he set.  Not caring so much about his rep got him the longest presidency in US history.

Start googling your way around this idea and you will find writers and commenters lamenting "incrementalism."  They want Obama to do something big.  The financial paradigm is not being reinvented.  Health care is only going to cost more as the inefficient (too much profit) interests are not being confronted.  Obama was fed by Wall Street more than his republican opponent.  Can he escape his neoliberal training?  He is the poster-boy for consensus building.  Careful, considered, can this cool-handed president bite?