To Terry Gain: Is Obama really all that less experienced for that sort of thing than Bush, Clinton and even that old cowboy Reagan were at this stage? In any case, as far as the economy goes, the plan he’s executing is really just the consensus of most top economists. People on the right have been jawing off about what the costs mean per person, but they keep forgetting about that 65+ trillion derivative thing in the background that can essentially absorb all of this without a burp. It looks as though the plan is to get things back to where they were before things really started to get bad, and then deal with the more tricky infrastructural issues that built up over the past decade, mostly to do with derivatives and similar imaginary money instruments.
As far as Walpin goes, it’s obvious from that US Attorney letter, as well as some additional Googling, that Walpin was not exactly a good person for that position (Obama should really just assume the worst and sweep out all of Bush’s appointments). The procedure that Obama followed — asking for Walpin’s resignation, suspending him with pay for 30 days when he refused, sending the official notifications out that he will be terminated in 30 days — sounds kind of like standard operating procedure for dealing with such low-level nuisances.
