Concern About Obama Policy Begins to Sink In at Local Level

Hope and change only gets you so far...

Filling the front page of the Columbus, Georgia Ledger-Enquirer:

Full front page image here.

Is Obama taking on too much at once, at economy's expense?
By Steven Thomma and David Lightman
McClatchy Newspapers
March 15, 2009

WASHINGTON — Is President Barack Obama trying to do too many things at the expense of focusing on Job One: the economy?

While the world awaits a coherent plan to fix America's banks, the president also is urging a vast overhaul of health care, a plan to tax and thus limit tailpipe and smokestack emissions thought to cause global warming, the development of alternative energy systems, a dramatic shift of the nation's tax burden, ambitious new education initiatives and a rewrite of financial regulations.

If that weren't enough in his first 50 days, he's also found time to create a White House council on women and girls and to travel weekly to politically key states. This week, he heads to California for two days to talk about the economy.

If he tries to do too much, some analysts say, he could end up a modern-day Jimmy Carter, blazing into town and throwing the kitchen sink at Congress, only to end his first year in office with a pile of broken plumbing.
...
William Galston, a top adviser in Democrat Bill Clinton's White House, noted that Carter, like Obama, thought it critical to enact his entire agenda as soon as possible when he took office in 1977.

"Everybody has warned me not to take on too many projects so early in the administration," Carter wrote in his diary. "But it's almost impossible for me to delay something that I see needs to be done."

That isn't the first time we've heard comparisons between Carter and Obama. What a shame voters weren't paying attention.