Now for the hard part

Ross Douthat, the new New York Times columnist, has a smart piece up at The Atlantic arguing that the beginning of the Obama presidency has been the easy bit precisely because his inheritance has been so bad. Here’s the nub of his argument:

“Barack Obama hit the trifecta. He’s inherited two ongoing military conflicts; he’s responsible for managing a global financial crisis that began on his predecessor’s watch; and he spent last week trying to pick his way through the political-legal minefield created by the Bush Administration’s interrogation policies. As a result, across an eventful three months in office, the events of greatest consequence – the stimulus bill, the strategizing around Afghanistan and Iraq, and the ongoing efforts to bail out and prop up America’s banking and automobile industries – have all been continuations, revisions, and responses to Bush-era policy and Bush-era crises.

These various inheritances may all prove to be tremendous burdens in the long run, and the Obama White House can be forgiven if they sometimes look back with envy on Bush’s own first hundred days – a moment of peace and relative economic stability, when the biggest controversy concerned arsenic levels in the drinking water.