Giving Obama a chance

A lot of people have been complaining that Obama isn't being given a chance to solve the financial crisis. While in general I agree that intense criticism after a few weeks isn't warranted, I can't help but think of the following analogy:

When kids become teenagers, if we're good parents, we want them to start making their own decisions and choices. When they fail to make good choices, their privileges are reduced in proportion to how bad the choices were.

Obama strikes me as a teenager who, when finally given freedom, skips all the intermediate steps and launches immediately into sleeping around, drinking, and using drugs. Are you going to let your kid keep doing that, hoping she'll realize the errors of her ways, because up until then she's always been a perfect kid? Of course not. You're going to clamp down on her so far and so fast she'll think she'll never be free again. Maybe if Obama wanted to be given a chance, he should have taken things a little more slowly. I've already talked about whether this was really a crisis demanding immediate attention on a massive scale. Recently, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial that provided some evidence that we were already starting to come out the recession even before he took office and arguing why Obama's policies are going to stifle that.

Obama's acting like a teenager whose parents have, for the first time, left him home in the house to go on a long trip.

Another thought: Although I haven't heard him use the word "mandate", it's been implicit in some of his statements. ("We won. Get over it.") From where I sit, it seems to me there were two kinds of people who voted for Obama: the true believers and the people who were mad at Bush for spending too much money and horrified when the stockmarket started to fall drastically right before the election (talk about good timing--for Obama!). Those very same people are now really mad and demonstrating in the streets. The midterm elections in 2010 should be very interesting. My guess is that, unless Obama turns out to have been a financial genius (always possible--we are in uncharted territory), the Democrats are going to lose Congress again.