OLDEST IRISH AMERICAN NEWSPAPER IN USA, ESTABLISHED IN 1928
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A New Day

February 17, 2011

By Staff Reporter

After all the pomp and ceremony of the inauguration, today marks the first full day at the office for the nation’s 44th president.
It’s also day one for Vice President Joe Biden who, we expect, will have a pretty full plate of his own in the coming days.
We wish both of them the best of luck in their work. They need it and so do the rest of us.
Our nation is facing many tasks that need urgent addressing. Unemployment is rising at an all too rapid pace, the financial system is frozen and the risk of deflation hangs over the economy like a storm cloud.
Then there are the wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and behind them a long list of issues and matters of concern to Americans and the world.
For the time being at least, the Obama administration looks like it will enjoy a more or less unobstructed run in the direction it desires to proceed.
The Democrats enjoy a majority in Congress and Obama has been wise enough to reach across the aisle to Republicans. His early days might not be marked by any formal coalition government arrangement on Capitol Hill, but it looks as if we can expect a fair degree of bipartisan cooperation.
As such, the kind of knee-jerk ideological approach that has long dogged the nation’s politics might be taking a vacation mandated by the most difficult of circumstances.
We certainly hope it does because the new administration needs to be allowed try what it wants to try. If that does not work, the White House and Congress will have to be light-footed enough to try something else. Digging political trenches is not the way to proceed for the foreseeable future.
Nobody can really envy the new administration too much, or indeed the nation’s House and Senate legislators. It would seem that when we Americans behave foolishly in extremis and live beyond our means, the economy caves in.
When we start behaving ourselves it stays stuck in the doldrums. Finding the appropriate balance between government action and market forces and maintaining it will be a most difficult job, one that will require sustained attention over the next four years and beyond.
Governing a nation that is not just free, but as freewheeling as the United States, is a daunting task even in good times.
But a clear majority of voters clearly felt that Barack Hussein Obama was the best qualified for the job at this critical time in the national narrative. We suspect that, given his performance during the transition period, many who did not vote for him in November are beginning to see things this way too, or are at least prepared to reserve judgment for a time, possibly as long as the two years that most commentators believe Obama has to set the nation’s track on the right course.
This paper endorsed Barack Obama, but in doing so we did not suspend our critical faculties. That said, we wish the new president and vice president every success because theirs will be ours. And it all starts today.

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