First impressions are important, for better and for worse. The Obama presidency is now in the process of making its first impressions, and the record so far is mixed. I say so as someone who did not vote for either major party candidate, as indicated in a prior entry, so I can at least claim objectivity. That is more than most print and electronic journalists can claim, most of whom voted for and are now fawning and otherwise bending over backwards to spin positively what has been going on over most of the past week.  I now better understand Robert Samuelson's decision never to vote for fear that it would distort his capacity for journalistic objectivity. What once struck me as an affectation or a quirk now actually makes sense.

On the one hand, the accumulation of Executive Orders the President has issued overturning a range of Bush policies--on presidential authority regarding counterterrorism, on environmental issues, stem-cell research, on abortion within the domain of U.S. foreign aid practices--has shown two things, both of them positive. First, this Administration experienced a functional transition period, unlike the Democratic administration before it; it knew at least some of the things it wanted to do, which shows that the Presidential team was processing policy flow properly. Second, it shows that the President is in charge, and that he has taken charge in a non-confrontational, matter-of-fact, low-rhetorical fashion. That is very good; it is much better to let one's deed do the talking than to mistake one's talking for deeds. 

On the other hand, the main business at hand--the economic stimulus package--is unimpressive in the extreme. It is, as many commentators have pointed out, a grab-bag of Democratic Party pork-barrel favorites that will not help the economy quickly, that are very expensive and that show no obvious sense of thoughtful intent about how to take advantage of the economic crisis to really shape the future for the better. It is, once again, the "this old house" proclivity at work. Instead of laying 3,000 miles of new wire, for example, why not get smart and start burying the electrical power transmission system underground?  It's more expensive on the front end but saves a lot on the back end; ever wonder why the more advanced European countries do not experience massive power outages when there are storms? Because they don't put their power lines up in the air like a bunch of ninnies.

Obviously, there are complications here. This is a big country; most of them are small so the economics work out a little differently. But what this really has to do with is the capacity to plan and to do so synergistically, comprehensively. One gets the feeling that we've practically lost the ability to do that in this country, except perhaps in the military, where outcomes rather than mere processes actually matter. Where once our town meetings were full of civil engineers, now they're full of lawyers and consultants. Oh, boy.

Even worse, the Congress is still operating as it has for years -- in a culture of transactional patronage. The bill under discussion is all about this transactional culture. It's all about Congressman doing favors for lobbyists who, in return, will help them raise money for re-election -- got to buy those TV ads, you know. If Barack Obama really wants to change American politics and make them functional again, he needs to attack this K-Street mafia, transactional culture head on, and he needs to do it now. He clearly isn't.

From time to time in the campaign Obama gave reason for us to believe that he understood all this. Yes, he voted for the farm bill, that atrocity and paragon of transactional politics, but the Iowa caucasus were afoot and the man wanted to win. But he still seemed to know what the problem was. Does he still? 

It isn't easy to attack this problem, to be sure. He has an uneven relationship so far, let's put it, with the Democratic Congress, and there is an underlying reason why this relationship is liable to get worse:  Obama cares about poor people, people of color, and wants a kind of redistributive justice for them short of formal reparations. This is the one constant in his view of the world of American politics; he seems to have few other specific programmatic convictions. Whatever it says, the Congress acts like it cares about the so-called  middle class squeeze, not about poor people. This disjunction can be finessed for a time, but it cannot be ignored. Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Reid have power, and their priorities, whatever they may claim, are not Obama's. 

So in the face of that difference, how is the President to attack the infrastructure of Congress' political power -- precisely the transactional culture that sells the public trust to special interests with their lobbyists, aggressive "professional" associations and exclusionary public-sector "unions" that bear no resemblance to real unions of laborers who actually make things people can use.  How can he take on the transactional culture, assuming for the sake of argument that he wants to, when any attempt to do so will sour his young working relationshp with Pelosi, Reid at al.?  I honestly don't see how he can, right now; if I knew I'd tell him. And the more's the pity for it.