Coming Down To Earth?

The Economist says Obama's Presidency is coming down to Earth, and they cite Buffett:

Mr Buffett has given voice to widespread worries about the administration’s failure to prioritize. “Job one is to win the war, the economic war. Job two is to win the economic war—and job three. And you can’t expect people to unite behind you if you’re trying to jam a whole bunch of things down their throat.”

Buffett is wrong to criticize. Obama and his team have done everything feasible and necessary to handle the financial crisis and restart growth. People will be surprised by how quickly things will change, and there's a glimmer of hope that it is already beginning. The major threat for America now lies in the structural problems it faces. And in this, Obama is right to be strong and efficient in trying to move us forward. He is sacrificing his own interests and tranquility for the benefits of our future. For this, he should be praised.

This Economist article, however, does the opposite, and in the process displays an all-too-familiar logical problem of keeping things in perspective. His faulty qualities, according to this article, are his optimism, hard-work and ambition (really?); his mistakes include mis-chosen cabinet members and 165 million in bonuses. These are very obviously minor in scale. Do I even need to list off the hundreds of real, serious, structural problems which were caused or left to us by the previous administration? And yet for some reason, the Economist was hesitant to rule Bush's presidency a disaster after 8 years, and it is already citing Obama's as potentially such.