Gonna Need a Bigger Boat

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NYT

Barack Obama surely has one of the toughest leadership challenges any incoming president has ever faced. We’re in the midst of a terrible economic meltdown, the current administration has lost all credibility, the House of Representatives is full of knuckle-dragging Neanderthals, and the public is being whipsawed between free-market fundamentalists preaching the virtues of just letting the market rip and left-wingers who think we can punish Wall Street while protecting Main Street. It feels like a mess with no one in charge.

Now is when we need a president who has the skill, the vision and the courage to cut through this cacophony, pull us together as one nation and inspire and enable us to do the one thing we can and must do right now:

Go shopping.

Obama can’t wait until Jan. 20 to weigh in on this. If we don’t stimulate the global economy fast enough and big enough, some of Obama’s inaugural balls might be held in soup kitchens.

(More here.)