by Lee Stranahan
Watching this morning's announcement of the economic team and the short press conference that followed, I had the jarring feeling of watching a competent person who will be running the U.S. government. The closest President-elect Obama seems to have come to ideology this morning is the idea that the government won't just be about helping the rich get richer for the next four years...and that's really just common f-cking sense.
I'm sure plenty of people saw something different because they are used to seeing our politics through ideological glasses and that's a tricky and distorting filter to see Barack Obama through. But with this very pragmatic framing, now the question will be whether he actually succeeds in producing results or not. Failure won't have an belief system to hide behind; create jobs, fix the markets, move the country forward or else we're looking at one term.