I don't think there have been many presidencies that have begun by facing so many large emergencies as this one.  I think that he is postponing some of the "smaller" issues (I put quotes around the word smaller because they aren't small to people directly affected) because they may dilute the public's limited attention away from the more urgent, acute issues that affect everyone.   Fundamental change takes time, and I think he is merely being careful.   Sometimes it feels like he's being much too ginger, but it's early yet and I am taking a wait and see attitude.  I think he's trying to turn the train without derailing it, which is probably a lesson he took from the Jimmy Carter years.  My guess is that he will get less and less accommodating to the opposition as time moves on if things don't start to happen.

Many predicted last autumn that we were headed for a depression, and it certainly looked that way for a while.   While a lot of the decisions he has made have seemed like they didn't go far enough, or have gone too far putting us into greater debt, or were too easy on the banks, etc. he can at least make a case that the economy has not collapsed.   It could still happen, and even if it doesn't we may never know if it would have or not, but that's the way it is when you avoid a catastrophe, you can never get full credit because you can never know for sure what would have happened taking a different path.  The same thing will be true of problems like global warming.   If we avoid the worst effects you will never see a day when the critics stop their frantic griping and congratulate those who acted for averting a crisis, they will claim the crisis would never have occurred in the first place.  If it proves catastrophic I suppose those who saw it coming will be small able to say, "I told you so", but that will be small comfort.  C'est la vie.

I think that a man expected to solve so many titanic problems deserves a certain amount of patience.  There are reasons that these issues have been kicked from presidency to presidency without being addressed.  Changing that is very unlikely to happen overnight and with the pantywaist Democratic majority that we have out there it won't be easy even taking it slowly. In any case I think it's way too soon to draw any conclusions.