Do you feel any different?

So today is the first day of the rest of our lives…right?  Yesterday, history was made.  Obama swooped in and saved us all from certain doom.  Once again things will be OK.  Right?

I don’t know about you, but I feel exactly the same as I did yesterday.  Maybe a little less stressed, but that has less to do with Obama and the fact I got a lot accomplished yesterday.  Who knows though, maybe Obama eased my pain…

My point is, we should all curtail our expectations.  The supposed great thing about our country is no single man should be able to wield enough power to completely change the way our country operates (I believe the judicial and legislative branches might have some thoughts on their own about President Obama’s policies).  I feel the burden of expectations are mounting and I wonder if a rather untested politician has the wherewithal to live up to what is expected.  Americans are so disillusioned with the America President Bush created they expect President Obama to come in and make things right again.

My hope is he is smart enough to realize we can’t spend our way out of a recession.  Instead of creating jobs he should focus on helping industries create careers and helping Americans learn how to help themselves.  How can we expect or citizens to be smart about their debt if our own government isn’t?

I pray that President Obama is smart enough to make the right decisions without bankrupting our country and prolonging our current turmoil.  He should start by reading a recent WSJ Op-Ed about the Great Depression.  The following excerpt I hope the President takes to heart:

By 1939 Roosevelt’s own Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, had realized that the New Deal economic policies had failed. “We have tried spending money,” Morgenthau wrote in his diary. “We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. . . . After eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. . . . And an enormous debt to boot!”