State of the Union-ish

Know how they say in Summer camp the days are long but the weeks are short? Well, like a pre-teen with an accelerated activity schedule, Obama has chosen to live life faster than the rest of us.

Case in point: Obama decided to move what looked a whole lot like his first state of the union address to tonight.

It's kinda a genius move. A president is always most effective in his first year in office (first two years if you're lucky). Besides, he's got friendly majorities in the House and Senate now; who knows how it will look in two years. He's already done in a month what most presidents would do in a year. Why not cram what should by all rights be four years of governing in to the next twelve months?

One thing he won't be doing is wasting time. Obama is helped here by so far having only problems that are so big and awful that they've been pounding us since before the end of the campaign. That means that a lot of the things he said tonight sounded like familiar promises from his campaign.

Unlike, say, the Clinton administration, which was very much a reactionary administration, and the Bush administration, which lead the federal government where it wanted to go despite what the actual problems were that the country needed to address, Obama here is both actively pushing forward on his agenda and addressing problems that the nation needs to deal with.

Someone on CNN is punditing now: "Look, if he's able to achieve even half of what he said, a lot of folks will pleased."

Yes, Obama is ambitious. Yes he's confident. We knew that when we hired him. So what we've got now is a smart, focused, ambitious guy who learns wicked fast and is pointing this country in exactly the direction it needs to go, just like he's always said he would.

It's perhaps a sign of how bad things have gotten, how challenging the obstacles that Obama will have to deal with, that my main thought is "let's wait and see how he'll do." We should be a lot more excited than this. But, for now, Obama is everything we could hope for.