Had to get in a clinton post for the day. I thought that we might get by a single day without a post. Congrats.

66% approve of Hillary as Secretary of State, including a surprisingly high 65% of independents -- another sign of the surprising degree to which her Dem primary campaign erased some of Hillary's image as a polarizing figure.

I don't think it was Hillary's primary campaign that made her less polarizing -- it was how she ended it and then her performance throughout the general election campaign.

I was harshly critical of the way her campaign was run before she conceded, but even I was impressed at tone she set in her convention speech and the amount of campaigning she did for Obama. And while she wouldn't have been my first choice, I have no problem with her being secretary of state so long as she really is implementing Obama's foreign policy.

You miss a more logical conclusion: in the last month things have cratered worse for the economy. At some point it's clear that the president can only do so much.

Obama's biggest problem is that his "buying time" isn't going to happen. It's still 2 full months before he has his hands on the controls -- that's already 2 more months of free-fall and lame duck government.

While I don't expect him to be working closely with GWB over the next two months, I expect he is already on the phone with Sr Dem and GOP leaders to get as much of a jump start on Jan 20 as possible.

Um, yeah. Deflation is going to cause big problems.

Actually, count me as among those who believes Obama will not be able to improve the economy a great deal.

It's not his fault. I just have a feeling we're in the middle ofa category 4 hurricane and very likely it will spiral into a category 5 before the end of the years.

Too many variables are out of his control.

I've been searching for polls on the transition between Bush and Clinton (unsuccessfully) and came across this:

WASHINGTON - The signs are everywhere: This has been a campaign year in which voters are decidedly negative about negative campaigns.

President Bush especially has found that his negative attacks have not worked.

It's a dramatic turnabout from 1988, when conventional wisdom held that the Bush attack machine all but destroyed Michael Dukakis.

Yet, with the debates over, Bush has little choice but to follow traditional campaigning and to fire the last weapon left in his arsenal - TV ads attacking Bill Clinton on taxes and trust.

The problem for Bush, the experts say, is that voters this year are so worried about the nation's problems that they are tuning out such attacks.

Interesting similarity to this year.

And as I predicted, the prog/liberal wing will accept failure after failure and try to place blame elsewhere. SOP

All of this commentary about the propiety of names is highly informative and educational. It's a good thing there's nothing more important to discuss.

Talk about spin! "44%"??

71% think he will be able to do something more than "not much" according to the linked pdf.

Bush spent 8 years pushing as much money, trillions and trillions, over to the supply side of the economy, which hollowed out demand.

It was then papered over with cheap money from China.

All this happened after 20 years of supply side economics. There was already too much money on the Supply Side when Bush took office. That's what caused the deflationary recession he had at the start. That's what causes stock market bubbles - too much money too little return because there's too little demand out there.

I've always thought that Bush's policies were a suicide mission. I told everyone I knew. Now that the nation is in a tailspin, they act like what I said was just a coincidence.

The only way Obama can truly save the economy, is reach right over into the supply side, grab all that gifted money, and then some, and drag it over to the demand side.

That might mean soak the rich taxes. That might mean taxes, not just on income, but on out right wealth, that might mean the kind of taxes we had during WWII.

On a longer term, we need structural changes to ensure that the balance of bargaining power over wages is such that wages always advance with productivity.

For a society: Concentrated wealth is like standing up in a canoe, it's prone to sudden epic disaster.

Hillary Clinton was never polarizing. That was all about 16 years of right-wing spin attacks that MSM peddled as fact. Hillary Clinton has always been one classy lady and one terrific mom.

As for the doom and gloom on the economy, I believe that we are seeing a rather gross over reaction to the gross inaction of the last couple of years. Everybody knew we had an extended housing bubble but policy makers knew that to correct that bubble would throw the country into recession heading into the 2008 election. What they didn't seem to understand was that housing couldn't be made to extend out far enough to avoid the certain recession and only meant that the recession would be worse as a result.

The problem I have to date is that the pressing problem is very weak demand. We need immediate action in that area more than the activity in proping up Citi. Bush is incapable of acknowleging that supply side is the cause of the current problem so he cannot shift gears and propose demand side measures to reverse his failed policies. That, sadly, has to wait another 60 days.