Give Carter some credit

When the final chapter is written on the Obama interregnum, which hopefully lasts but four years, it will be seen that he lost several opportunities to economically right the ship and that he failed miserably.  This article by the always reliable Holman Jenkins of the WSJ, hits the nail on the head.  Obama inherited a mess, of that there is no doubt, however instead of focussing on some fairly obvious fixes, he choose to pursue a radical plan of reshaping and redirecting the entire economy which in the end only made the mess he inherited messier.  Jenkins explains that because Obama had no real world experience organizing or running anything other than some community social justice program, he had no basis in the real world for making real world decisions during a crises.  Thus, he plowed full steam ahead with an experimental energy policy that in the best of economic circumstances could be helpful only at the margins, and he crammed through his democrat controlled Congress a redo of 1/7th of the US economy a socialized healthcare plan that was thoroughly rejected by the public just a little over a decade ago.  In addition he turned loose all manner of so-called czars whose mission was to re-regulate the economy while at the same time demonizing the producer class in the country and re-empowering unions.  All of these moves have been tried in different countries and even in this country before and they have failed repeatedly.  Like the only other academic in the history of the White House, another "progressive" Woodrow Wilson,  Obama has given us the specter of abstract thinking to address and solve real life problems.  How many times do we have to repeat the mistakes of the past before recognizing the need to apply proven solutions to our problems?  It's all very discouraging.