The difficulty for Mr. Obama will be when the public sees where his decisions lead - higher inflation, higher interest rates, higher taxes, sluggish growth, and a jobless recovery.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
To get anything done, Obama has to be seen as having winning economy - which isn't easy.
Obama has demonstrated no desire to make tough choices. Americans demand a more efficient, effective government, but his budget calls for more taxes and more spending. It employs deceptive accounting gimmicks but does nothing to tackle long-term entitlement problems, nothing to save Medicare or fix Social Security.
Obama sees everything backward. Where Americans see individual achievement, he sees government's work. Where we see failing companies, he sees innovation worth subsidizing. Where we see the need for economic growth, he sees a need for higher taxes.
Barack Obama may have found the answer to his biggest rhetorical challenge: When millions of voters are unemployed or underemployed, how does a president simultaneously sound realistic and optimistic?
Obama invented himself against all odds and repeated parental abandonment, and he worked hard to regiment his emotions. But now that can come across as imperviousness and inflexibility. He wants to run the agenda; he doesn't want the agenda to run him. Once you become president, though, there's no way to predict what your crises will be.
Obama's gonna play Santa Claus with the minimum wage. He's got no successes to brag about. He cannot talk about a robust job market. In fact, the very fact he's talking about the minimum wage is evidence there is no robust job market.
Look, the president is elected to lead and to face the country's biggest challenges. The country's biggest challenge domestically speaking, no doubt about it, is a debt crisis, and I'm really hoping that he is going to give us a budget that tackles this debt crisis.
Unless and until Barack Obama addresses the full depth of Americans' anger with his full arsenal of policy smarts and political gifts, his presidency and, worse, our economy will be paralyzed.
There are just some things about being president that are difficult.
The fundamental problem is that President Obama has grown government. He has grown the private sector jobs.
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