President Obama: "a leap into the unknown"

The Opacity of Hope

Excerpts:

... for all of [his] personal virtues, there remains an elusiveness, an opacity, to Mr. Obama's political character.

...

[For] 25 years Mr. Obama's political coalition has amassed a wish-list of regulatory and redistributionist ideas that would undercut [policies that promote growth]. The global warming crowd wants a huge new carbon tax that would hit the South and Midwest especially hard. Big Labor wants to make union organizing easier, which would slow job creation. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is agitating to raise taxes immediately, even amid recession, to finance a spending spree we haven't seen since LBJ's Great Society. Part of Mr. Obama's success will depend on whether he says no to these liberal interests. If he does, he will make it easier for the economy's natural recuperative powers to work -- and he and his party will benefit.

...

We don't know if he is a genuine man of the left, or a more traditional pragmatist. The audacity of our hope is that as President he will use his considerable talents to return his party to the policies of growth, opportunity and the vigorous defense of U.S. interests that marked it the last time the country had such great expectations for a Democratic President -- under JFK.

Comment: It will be interesting to see what turns his administration takes.