....We don't yet know what Obama's America will look like, just as no one, not even Roosevelt, knew in March 1933 what New Deal America would look like when the president was finished. But if the current president has his way, the country will not look like the America of February 2009. That is the real meaning of last week.
"Last week marked an end to three years of a nation's drifting from bad to worse, an end to helpless acceptance of a malign fate," said the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal after FDR took power. "For an explanation of the incredible change which has come over the face of things here in the United States in a single week we must look to the fact that the new administration in Washington has superbly risen to the occasion."
Neither of those sentences quite applies to Obama's Washington, not quite yet, and it surely won't be the Journal's inclination to salute Obama quite that way anytime soon. Though Roosevelt didn't precisely know where he was leading the country, it was clear in the winter of 1933 that he was at the very least leading it somewhere. Three quarters of a century later, Americans have reason to feel the same way.
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