What Rocky Start?

One Lousy Week Aside, Obama Is Doing Fine

By Ruth Marcus
WashPost
Wednesday, February 11, 2009

To everyone out there despairing -- or rejoicing -- about the Obama administration's supposedly rocky start: Settle down. It's actually going rather well.

Sure, President Obama had a lousy week. A week is not a presidency. He blundered with the selection, and withdrawal, of Tom Daschle to spearhead his health-care reform effort. Indeed, the self-inflicted Daschle damage is twofold: In the short term, and along with other problematic nominees, to Obama's claim to signal change from Washington business as usual; in the longer term, to steering health reform through Congress.

And certainly, there were problems with the rollout of his stimulus package. The administration ceded too much control over the contents to House Democrats, although it was nowhere near as hands-off as it has been portrayed. It was entirely foreseeable that Republicans would cherry-pick individual elements for ridicule; the administration excised some of them but failed to do enough to anticipate the outsized problems that remaining items would cause. The president, until he rebooted this week with travel and a prime-time news conference, lost control of the message to Republicans, who were only too happy to seize it.

But it is difficult to assemble a measure of this magnitude -- this audacity, even -- once you've settled into office. It's nearly impossible to do it from the outside or on the way in the door, without functioning e-mail or phones. Expecting the Obama team to operate perfectly under these conditions is like expecting a first-year med student to perform surgery -- before the stethoscopes have been handed out.

(More here.)