Paradise postponed

I did not expect much, but there was a little bit of audacity of hoping: circumstances make a president, and the circumstances for Obama have not been much different than what FDR faced, having quite cautiously campaigned for balanced budgets and relatively orthodox economic policies. It is pretty meaningless to second guess from such a laughably distant vantage point - and perhaps the correct reading of the balance of power is that no meaningful reform can even be attempted and all that is possible to have is an avoidance of outright idiocy and outright sabotage of the few central social liberal structures (both became very familiar during Obamas predecessor's awful reign). But still, it is very hard to avoid the thought that maybe there were the makings of a transformation of the political landscape in the scary collapse of trust in the financial markets. I guess we'll never know now.