Obama's Reform Agenda: Is He Trying to Do Too Much?

On the best of days, Washington and Wall Street are as antsy as a boy who plants an acorn and then starts talking about climbing the tree. And these are not the best of days. Under the stress of a global financial disaster and juiced up on the amphetamine of 24-hour cable chatter, America's axis of money and influence is jittery and nervous and primed for panic.

This is relevant background for digesting the news that Barack Obama's honeymoon in the corridors of power has come to an abrupt end — even as opinion polls show that the public remains by his side. To most grownups, seven weeks is an eyeblink (in baseball it's called spring training), but along the Acela line it is much ... too ... long to wait for Obama to fix the economy. And so the doomsday chorus began: He's trying to do too much. He's doing too little. His bank bailout is too complicated. His health-care plan is hollow. The great orator can't communicate his priorities. His priorities are clear — but screwed up.

The problem for Obama, and perhaps for us all, is that some of the hand-wringing came neither from flibbertigibbets nor from opportunists. Some came from Warren Buffett, whose patient ability to take the long view has made him the wealthiest investor in America. Buffett was — and is — an Obama supporter, but he took to the airwaves on March 9 to try to seize the young President's attention away from health care and education and energy and refocus it back onto the economy. Warning that Obama's agenda has become too sprawling and provocative, Buffett admonished, "Job 1 is to win the war, the economic war. Job 2 is to win the economic war — and Job 3." He added, "You can't expect people to unite behind you if you're trying to jam a whole bunch of things down their throat." The oracle's verdict was quickly endorsed by Jack Welch and Andrew Grove, retired CEOs of General Electric and Intel, respectively. And from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke came this measured nudge: "Until we stabilize the financial system, a sustainable economic recovery will remain out of reach." (See 25 people to blame for the financial crisis.)

Another unexcitable voice, from the laconic flatlands of North Dakota — Senator Kent Conrad — warned on March 10 that Obama's $3.6 trillion budget is already in trouble on Capitol Hill. Democrats may be in power, but they aren't all in agreement with Obama's do-it-all-now approach to solving the nation's most persistent problems. "Anybody who thinks it will be easy to get the votes on the budget in the conditions that we face is smoking something," Conrad declared.

Obama fired back the same day. "I know there are some who believe we can only handle one challenge at a time," he said, invoking Lincoln's launch of the transcontinental railroad in the midst of the Civil War. "We don't have the luxury of choosing between getting our economy moving now and rebuilding it over the long term." The political strategy of the Administration can be summed up in a motto: "Never waste a good crisis," as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it. That phrase has been the rallying cry of the Obama team for months. But it increasingly appears that the Administration was unprepared for both the severity of the recession and the political resistance to trying to do so much at once. And so the Obama team is coming to grips with another motto for the ages: Sometimes a crisis is an opportunity — but sometimes it's just a crisis.

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