After listening to Biden on Afghanistan and Obama this morning on various executive orders on the environment and energy, I think that they should concede that there is a shelf-life on ‘Bush did it’. We know every new administration uses the alleged sins of the former to contrast their own noble efforts and the difficulty of cleaning up someone else’s mess (the Clinton pardons were good fodder in January 2001, and FDR ‘Hoovered’ the country for 12 years). But after a few days, the country wants to see what the new guys can do without the constant, and now stale, talking points from the campaign.
There is some danger, too, of bashing ‘Bush the monster’ while adhering to many of his initiatives (the Petraeus withdrawal plan from Iraq, Patriot Act, FISA, etc) with merely a new rhetorical veneer, or sorta promising kinda change–like the “task force” and “within the year” phraseology about Gitmo. For Obama, this advice might be especially welcome, since we already know that he is a brilliant campaigner, rhetorician, uniter, etc.. But, given his brief record in the Senate, rather so-so legislative tenure in Illinois, and problematic record as a community organizer, it is now time to shift modes. Rather than the debate/’hope and change’ mode, he must simply begin the hard business of governance in which each decision creates as many enemies as friends, and choices are no longer perfect/awful morality tales of perpetual campaigning, but bad/worse dilemmas of executive responsibility.