The Jimmy Carterization of Obama?

It is hard to disagree or even begin to argue with Willem Buiter's FT column this morning on the disappointments of the Obama administration. The honeymoon is over. It is no longer enough to not be George Bush. Not only has Obama failed to deliver on moral reconciliation following Bush or on a real change of direction in foreign policy, his administration seems to have completely dropped the ball on financial reform. As Buiter notes

The US officials supposed to lead the systemic reforms of the domestic and international financial system are the same people who failed to recognise the emerging disfunctionalities that produced the crisis, who indeed were responsible for creating some of these disfunctionalities, who failed to prevent the crisis, who re-fought the battle of the 1930s (and insist on taking great credit for doing so) and left us with the moral hazard nightmare legacy of the end of the first decade of the twenty first century.

On the fiscal side, Barack Obama is presiding over the biggest peace-time government deficits and public debt build-up ever. According to my back-of-the-envelope calculations there is about a 10 percent of GDP gap between the medium and longer-term spending plans of the Obama administration and the taxes the Congress is willing and able to impose. The reality that you cannot run a West-European welfare state (with decent quality health care, decent pre-school, primary and secondary school education for all), rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure, invest in the environment and fulfill your post-imperial global strategic ambitions while raising 33 percent of GDP in taxes, has not yet dawned on the Obama administration or on the American people at large.

Even more damning for Buiter is that in the face of continued economic stagnation, the administration seems to be abandoning commitments to open trade -- the very thing that deepened and cemented the depression eighty years ago.

This is an administration that appears to want to please everyone even at the expense of a coherent policy direction.