Obama’s true problem may be both far easier to grasp and far more intractible (for him) than he and many others realize.

Simply put, the problem here is finance and credit (i.e. money, in general) It is NOT health care or education or energy, fer criminy sakes, it is the financial system. If he abandoned ALL other issues to focus on that (hedgehog style) he’d be a third of the way home.

But his two fold problem is a) like defense, the entire ideology of “community activists” and the Democratic Party finds even discussing money, much less studying it and becoming expert on it, odious and immoral, and shys away from it as if from a bad smell. Profits are for other, less moral people to produce, theirs is to take their profits and use them “wisely”. So he is trapped and surrounded by the clueless, and has probably never even been exposed for any period of time to the non-clueless.

and b) The ONLY things Obama can do in focusing on and facing the financial problem fly in the face of his entire ideology (cutting spending, freeing up companies, minimizing regulation at least for non-banking businesses, etc). It’s like trying to get a radical Muslim to start “istening to the Jews” about solving a problem because they are in fact more knowledgable about the problem than the radical Muslim is. He should listen, but he cannot, he just cannot. There are too many of his lifetime foundational beliefs across the board that would crumble into dust if he did.

So it might be easier for Obama than he realizes to at least give us the confidence that he is on the attack against economic disaster. He could do it…. but he cannot do it…. so he won’t. And he, and we, will flounder.