Angular Momentum

A very good friend of mine was all for creating a level playing field when it came time for our new president to be sworn in. She maintained that the same yardstick that we used to measure the accomplishments of Pinhead be used to track the efforts of this new administration. How would the media respond? How would the American public react to this new head of state? Well, after nine months, I suppose that we've come full term, and the honeymoon has been over for some time now.
The Hope and Change Express still runs at full-steam, but it has to make a lot of stops along the way. That means that the changes that some of us might have expected are still waiting on the platform, somewhere down the track. Our expectations were, we come to find, irrationally high. Or at least some of them were. American soldiers are still fighting and dying in the Middle East while "the bad guys" continue to elude us. The economy has begun to show signs of renewed vigor, but it remains on life-support for the time being. The promise of repealing "Don't ask, don't tell" has been repeated, but has yet to be acted upon. There is no national health care system.
Too soon? Perhaps for all of these things. We elected a new president. There was an orderly transition of power, and maybe that's the trouble. In so many ways, it's business as usual. It still takes a majority of two-thirds, or a Supreme Court decision, or another mid-term election. This one man didn't change any of that. He probably won't. Barack Obama is still a part of the machine. A very important cog, admittedly, but still reliant on the chains and pulleys around him to move things around. So it's been nine months. There are still a number of irons in the fire. Cash for clunkers was pretty cool. The inauguration was awesome. Heading the UN Security Council and calling for nuclear disarmament was very impressive.
And now we wait. With just a trace less patience than we had a month ago, but more than we had a year ago. Something as big as our country is hard to slow down, and even harder to steer when you want to change directions abruptly. Now we just have to wait and see if the brakes still work.