"More Hearings And More Pressure"

This Bloomberg article outlines what might be the best part of Tuesday's electoral results.

During the past few days I've spent some time gauging sentiment on the message boards of sites like Huffington Post and Daily Kos. It's impossible to miss posts about the bailouts, Geithner, Summers, Bernanke, the absence of perp walks, and what many see as the lack of real financial reform. On the day Bernanke was reconfirmed by a Democratic Senate back in January, I wrote:

If you're not sure about the degree of apathy and despondency on the Left, spend a few minutes poking around the message boards. The enthusiasm gap is so wide you could fit a foreclosed McMansion in it. Nature may abhor a vacuum, but Sarah Palin doesn't. This is why Obama's decision to continue slapping the country in the face with Bernanke (and Geithner) was profoundly irresponsible. If denying a furious public some scalps and going to the wall for a failed Bush appointee amplifies the impact of broader legislative impotence and provides an opening for political extremism at the national level, it may turn out to be one of the most consequential unforced errors in recent American politics.

It turned out I was wrong about legislative impotence, but the striking indifference of Democratic voters to arguably profound legislative accomplishment only highlights the importance of Obama's apathy-inducing unforced errors. Unless he took office believing an economy in freefall would turn around quickly, Obama had to understand that by appointing and retaining symbols of failed or unpopular economic policies, his signature issue -- "change" -- would gradually become a vulnerability. If he did not it was a terrible mistake. He wound up owning the status quo sooner and to a greater degree than he should have. This was both avoidable and predictable, so he deserves no sympathy. And with his suprapolitical monetary/de facto fiscal zealot about to embark on the next round of what should only be called money printing -- the innocuous term "quantitative easing" just makes it dangerously palatable, but of course that's the point -- Obama will own those consequences as well.