There's Something about Barry.

Just a quick thought for this busy day: I keep wondering when President Obama will move beyond campaign mode and start outlining a future for the country.

As the candidate of the "out" party, running against a monumentally unpopular President - and make no mistake, Mr. Obama ran against President Bush, not John McCain - candidate Obama consistently defined himself in terms of his differences with the last administration. Even when his tone was positive, he spoke in terms of what he wasn't for, what he wouldn't do.

It worked brilliantly, but this is no longer the campaign.

The other day, in The New York Times, columnist Bob Herbert quoted the President as follows:

“Now, I have to say that given that they were running the show for a pretty long time prior to me getting there, and that their theory was tested pretty thoroughly and it’s landed us in the situation where we’ve got over a trillion-dollars’ worth of debt and the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression, I think I have a better argument in terms of economic thinking.”

Read that carefully. The central assertion goes something like this: "I must be right, because the other guys were so very, very wrong."

As a rare progressive supporting John McCain, I ran into that logical fallacy again and again during the campaign. In essence, the case for Mr. Obama seems to have been, "Sure, he's not very experienced or tested. But at least he's not Bush. Bush has been so awful, Obama's got to be an improvement!"

Which, of course, ignored the fact that John McCain, also, wasn't George W. Bush. The fundamental mistake of McCain's campaign was his failure to make that apparent - and, indeed, doing almost everything he could to make himself look like America's least popular politician.

But it also ignored the very real possibility that a bad president can be succeeded by another equally bad, or even worse. Take, for example, Franklin Pierce and his successor, James Buchanan.

Here's my point: President Obama is still working that same line. The Bush policies were a failure, therefore mine will be better. They were wrong, so I must be right.

Look at the quotation again. Mr. Obama never actually says what his argument is. He says that the Bush policies were disastrous - which is manifestly true - and then insists on the conclusion that "I have a better argument".

Really?

The deeper we go into this recession, and the longer I watch this administration, the more I fear that there is no guiding vision behind the Obama economic policy. It seems to consist of gestures and sound-bites, e.g., protectionist steel policy in the stimulus package, balanced by assurances that the new legislation means nothing if it contradicts our treaty obligations.

That's campaign stuff: A gesture to Group A, another to Group B. Baffle 'em with bullshit. Make policy after you're elected.

Well, you've been elected, Mr. Obama. The first of your 48 months has flown by. And we still don't have anything like a vision of the America which will emerge from this economic crisis.

The campaign is over, or should be. If you start running for re-election this early, I promise you, it ain't gonna happen.

This is one of those relatively rare times when the best political strategy is to govern well.