Presidential New Conference

I watched the Presidential News Conference just now - I have many reactions to the hour long Q&A with Obama, and they're mostly negative. Maybe it's just that I've had high hopes for him, and he seems to be participating in the same "The government is swell," rhetoric of past presidents. Perhaps we always judge those in office too harshly. In any case, I will reserve judgment on his budget until it has been given a chance (mostly because my knowledge of economics extends only as far as two intro classes).

What I will register surprise about, though, is the collective way the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were ignored. True, the economy is an important and pressing situation, but the war is too. The press focused almost all its attention on asking Obama about the economy, and Obama churned out answers that we'd already heard from him before. On one of the few foreign policy questions of the night, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Obama gave a vague answer and turned it back to the economy by talking about his belief in persistence.

I think the reason that I feel so uneasy, as I've mentioned before, is that I am very cynical about the government's power to control the economy. It has been done before, but with Congress and the president working, as Jones would put it, in a balance. Can government be powerful enough to control the economy in a separated system?