Already, Obama and his advisors are trying to tone down the enormous expectations they set during the campaign. They say the economic crisis is so bad that we may not be out of it for (ahem) five years! This looks to me like a not so subtle approach to a reelection campaign.

Perhaps now that Obama is getting all the information that the President gets, he has probably realized that there has been way more going on than he previously knew during his 6-month working stint in the Senate. (I don’t claim to know what is going on, but I am positive that neither the American public nor senate have access to all the information.) He has probably realized that this final verdict was not a verdict at all, but rather a complex web of proactions, reactions, and inevitables. This could have been coming for 5, 10, 20, or even 50 years.

Another option is that he knew he wouldn’t be able to fix the economy in a short amount of time, but decided to deceive the people into thinking he could. His entire campaign was centered around the word “change,” which connotes an abrupt shift in direction, speed, or mass. If he wanted to be completely honest during his campaign he would have made the slogan, “Slow Change We Can Believe In,” or “Evolution We Can Believe In.” Instead, he played on Americans’ short attention spans, manipulated their emotions, and promised to change the world.

I can see his administration’s policy now. He will continue to blame anything bad that happens on his predecessor, insisting that “fixing” things “takes time.” I can also see that the media will believe him and force that belief onto the American people. When will he begin to accept responsibility? He set these enormous expectations, not the media, not the people; they just merely believed him. That he is attempting to shift away from those expectations says that he is either deceitful or unwilling to accept responsibility for his actions. Or both.

President Harry S Truman had a sign on his desk: “The Buck Stops Here.” I believe Obama’s sign will read, “Bush Has The Buck; Give Me Yours.”