Our man reads from a different sheet of music.

Here's a rare instance of concentrated political insight that captures what voters wanted and what Mr. Obama's hell bent on "providing," or imposing, if you want to be picky about it:

And hardly anyone is gullible enough to think that socializing the health-insurance business, imposing massive taxes on energy, and increasing the power of unions are going to resolve a crisis that has its origins in the credit markets.

Obama seems to care about the economic crisis only to the extent that it is an impediment to or an instrument for winning support for policies in unrelated areas. It is as if President Bush had responded to 9/11 by launching an all-out campaign for private Social Security accounts.

Obama is president today not because Americans were enamored with his policy proposals but because they were persuaded that he was, by dint of temperament and intellect, the better man to lead the nation in a time of crisis.

Someone made a similar point about Pearl Harbor. FDR didn't approach that catastrophe from the standpoint of how he could exploit it to speed passage of better child labor laws or whatever was at the top of the Democrat Transformational Agenda at that time.

Think about it. What a monumental conceit to think that an endless campaign for the presidency in which the mantra was change necessarily meant change in the direction of European socialism rather than just a fine tuning of an otherwise phenomenally successful governmental and economic model. I might go to the doctor for treatment of a rash and an infected cut but I wouldn't buy the doctor's logic that changing my problematical state beyond applying some ointment and cleaning out the cut necessarily involves chemotherapy, amputation above the knee, and radiation of my alleged brain.

"Please Get Serious, Mr. President." By James Taranto, Best of the Web, Wall Street Journal, 3/13/09.